I heard a little about Niel's next project last night, and it does sound exciting. I look forward to trying it out.
Ten Years at Google
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Re: Ten Years at Google
#22Not sure but Blockly crashes my firefox. Weird!
50.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#23I heard a little about Niel's next project last night, and it does sound exciting. I look forward to trying it out.
I did not expect to see this here (nore Neil's post). Nice meeting you.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#24OMG clicked on https://neil.fraser.name/news/2016/11/21/ (G-train link) and i just can't get past those nails..
Heh. As a programmer that types a lot, obviously, I find it really annoying when my nails get any length on them at all - especially the index and middle fingers, it feels horrible whenever your nails hit the keys before your actual fingertips. I tend to keep a second pair of nail scissors at the office, as I can't even bear it until the end of the day (this often happens on a Monday). Accordingly, I always find it k…
I can't stand it either. Makes it even worse on aluminum keyboards/laptops.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#25Correct me if I'm wrong. Here of all places on the internet, an article with the title of "Ten Years at X" is expected to encapsulate some kind of intellectually rigorous narrative about the passing and the meaning of those 10 years to both the author and the organization. Or are we to assume that such standards no longer exist in order to receive upvotes on HN?
I see where you are coming from, but I liked it purely for the Malaysian School anecdote.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#26The laminated blockly story is awesome. Can't imagine how it must feel to see your work being used like that.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely disagree. I think it looks horrible and cluttered and wouldn't like to look at a complex version of this over flowcharts.
"it looks horrible and cluttered and wouldn't like to look at a complex version of this over flowcharts" You are right. It looks horrible and cluttered and could be made better. Though visuals and design aside, the idea is sound. There is a real barrier b/w textual/visual in software. You don't see this in other physical disciplines like EE. It would be interesting to have a better (easier to read, standardised etc.)…
There have been very many attempts. Scratch is a pre-cursor to Blockly[0] Code.org has an in-house build on top of Blockly[1] and then there are mobile apps like Hopscotch & Tynker based on Scratch[2][3]. There's also full-fledged game engines like Stencyl[4] based on Scratch as well. To be totally honest, the whole paradigm looks cluttered and illegible to me, and I've been researching learn-to-code environments for quite some time.
I'm not so sure "it could be made better".
That's not to say I think it's a lost cause: I think it works great for short, 5-10 line programs. Once programs grow larger it becomes very hard to reason with, like with most VPLs.
[0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] https://code.org [2] https://www.gethopscotch.com/ [3] https://www.tynker.com/ [4] http://stencyl.com/
Re: Ten Years at Google
#28The title of the article is very misleading. I would have loved to read how Google changed on the inside over the last 10 years. Or maybe even how the author changed. Instead, we get some spam about some tool that is neat.
I can't tell if you're parodying HN here. This is from someone's blog and is a personal reflection on his most important work of the past 10 years. Do you expect everyone to be an historian?
I expect an article titled "Ten years at Google" to talk about someone's experience at Google over the last 10 years, not a project that started in the last 5. If that's "being a historian", tell me why that's bad.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#29Someone had built an open source graphical Perl code generator that used blocks very similar to this. Looking back in your blog you used to be a heavy Perl programmer. Was it you that did that? Where's that original project, iirc it used to be on sf or something.
I can not think of the name of this!
My first real paying gig was for a local Pennsylvania company who distributed pBasic boards and merkur sets. They used an open source Perl IDE that allowed 3-5 graders to program the bot visually.
I didn't know Perl and was still in high school, but was able to make some great contributions (to the company version). Taught me how to manage very small amounts of memory. I owe the original author a thanks for making such a solidly coded tool.
The tool may have come from parallax software.
Re: Ten Years at Google
#30The title of the article is very misleading. I would have loved to read how Google changed on the inside over the last 10 years. Or maybe even how the author changed. Instead, we get some spam about some tool that is neat.
I was also a little disappointed, although I don't think I'd have written your comment...
I wonder if anyone has a favourite article that reflects on how they and Google changed over the ten years that they were there?