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Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

mockmechanics.com

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Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#41

Post by bigiain »

doinathing wrote: post #35

This looks amazing! Please consider making your website more accessible... the menu cannot be focused with the tab key, the images in your gallery do not have alt attributes. Those are some low hanging fruit you can correct. The overall strategy of toggling the main content with CSS might need some aria announcing so folks at least know different stuff is on screen as you move from one thing to another. Again, AMAZIN…

That's really cool feedback - and now I'm wondering if more projects shouldn't put their websites on GitHub (or similar) so people who want to contribute but who's skills are web/frontend focussed have an easy way to make updates and send pull requests?

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#42

Post by doinathing »

bigiain wrote: post #41
doinathing wrote: post #35

This looks amazing! Please consider making your website more accessible... the menu cannot be focused with the tab key, the images in your gallery do not have alt attributes. Those are some low hanging fruit you can correct. The overall strategy of toggling the main content with CSS might need some aria announcing so folks at least know different stuff is on screen as you move from one thing to another. Again, AMAZIN…

That's really cool feedback - and now I'm wondering if more projects shouldn't put their websites on GitHub (or similar) so people who want to contribute but who's skills are web/frontend focussed have an easy way to make updates and send pull requests?

I actually have started do this when I see an OSS project site that just needs some quick tweaks. It's easy to open the web editor and add missing labels or attributes or something.

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#43

Post by bigiain »

felipereigosa wrote: post #18
traceroute66 wrote: post #17

Surely I can't be the only one who saw the title "Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?" and thought ... sure mate, just go back to the 70's and you've got mechanical programming galore in the form of punch cards. ;-)

Haha... I remember talking to a teacher in college that used punch cards when he was young and I thought it was awesome, people were closer to the hardware you know? Hopefully my version of mechanical programming is a little more convenient :)

You know, punched cards and/or pianola rolls was the first thing I thought of watching you piano video when you mentioned wanting to record it. (my second thought was one of those cylindrical hand wound chimey music box things - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box#/media/File:Music_bo... )

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#44

Post by felipereigosa »

bigiain wrote: post #40
luminati wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a bit more on “formalize mechanical devices”? That has really piqued my interest especially since you mentioned dance choreography as an example. Do you have any examples/prior art you found interesting? One of the topics I occasionally like to think about is how to formally describe manufacturing steps in some structured/programming language. Maybe your program could be it. Would love to hear oth…

> Could you elaborate a bit more on “formalize mechanical devices”? It made me remember yesterday's post about SparkFun's new Al La Carte thing ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24920043 ) - and now I want a service that lets me design a machine in this using it's "standard parts", and then order a physical version of it :-) I wonder if some combination of lego/mechano style components, 3D printing, and magnetic…

You know I had actually considered this exact thing you want a while back as a way to move forward once I had the program working. You could design all the graphs, logical connections on the computer then load them and just snap all the parts together. The main drawback I encountered then was how to implement the wagon since it can move in an arbitrary track path circuit. I'm not sure how that could be done. Another idea that's a little out there is that if someone could implement the basic building blocks using molecular parts, then maybe that's how we build molecular machines!

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#46

Post by doinathing »

felipereigosa wrote: post #36
doinathing wrote: post #35

This looks amazing! Please consider making your website more accessible... the menu cannot be focused with the tab key, the images in your gallery do not have alt attributes. Those are some low hanging fruit you can correct. The overall strategy of toggling the main content with CSS might need some aria announcing so folks at least know different stuff is on screen as you move from one thing to another. Again, AMAZIN…

Not at all, this is exactly what I want, some good feedback, I hadn't even considered those things you mentioned, I'll look into it thanks!

In order to make it fully accessible you might want to start from scratch and make a more traditional site that's not doing so much with JS to manage what content is on screen. Which might be more than you have time to deal with. But generally, when showing/hiding/navigating with JS, you are short-circuiting a lot of stuff you get for free with the browser (focus reset, announcing of changes etc.) and you have to reimplement a bunch of stuff in JS to get the same effect.

Sometimes it's worth it if what you are doing with JS is highly interactive & there's a payoff. But in this case, each thing of content could be its own page, and that plus a little more semantic HTML would do wonders.

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#47

Post by felipereigosa »

maddyboo wrote: post #39

This is one of the first things I’ve seen in a looong time that got me genuinely excited. I can see so many possibilities for the future. Kudos and great work, I think you have beginnings of something great on your hands.

Thanks, we do :). From now on what the program can do depends on what people build, the library machines they create so that other people can use them as parts and so on.

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#48

Post by felipereigosa »

bigiain wrote: post #43
felipereigosa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha... I remember talking to a teacher in college that used punch cards when he was young and I thought it was awesome, people were closer to the hardware you know? Hopefully my version of mechanical programming is a little more convenient :)

You know, punched cards and/or pianola rolls was the first thing I thought of watching you piano video when you mentioned wanting to record it. (my second thought was one of those cylindrical hand wound chimey music box things - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box#/media/File:Music_bo... )

That's a good idea. When I recorded the piano I hadn't built the tetris machine yet so I didn't have the proximity-test library part. Now it would be so easy to test if there is a hole or not (or a bump) in a block working as a sheet as it moves down. And now that scripts have editing powers, I can see how I could add a block to where the "cursor" is when I'm recording the song.

Re: Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?

#49

Post by felipereigosa »

doinathing wrote: post #46
felipereigosa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, this is exactly what I want, some good feedback, I hadn't even considered those things you mentioned, I'll look into it thanks!

In order to make it fully accessible you might want to start from scratch and make a more traditional site that's not doing so much with JS to manage what content is on screen. Which might be more than you have time to deal with. But generally, when showing/hiding/navigating with JS, you are short-circuiting a lot of stuff you get for free with the browser (focus reset, announcing of changes etc.) and you have to rei…

You're probably right, it's just that I'm more of a programmer than a web designer (this is my first site) so I just built everything with Clojure/Clojurescript. But I'll definitely do that once I have some time.
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