Cool!
Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
261–270 of 304 posts
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#262Hey man, great job! You got some great advice here from the HN crowd and I'd just like to add one more: blog.
Set up your own site and blog about your journey and the lessons you've picked up along the way. Learning is about working and reflection. Blogging is a good platform for that. The very act of writing the content itself is reinforcing your knowledge. Dive into the work, research, reflect, stay hungry and repeat. That's what it's all about. Apart from that, you'll be expanding your network as well. Having some amount of folks following your journey is not just a good way of inspiring oneself, but also gives you an opportunity to inspire others as well.
Anyways, keep it up! You're definitely going places.
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's so freaking cool. Git rocks, and I remember how psyched I was when I learned about it. What's your next project?
I'm not sure. I'm always messing around with different projects. I used blocklike.js to jump from Scratch to JavaScript. Then I worked for months on this one game for the app store called Sticky Quest. You can find it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sticky-quest/id1425679649?mt... This how I learned how to use npm packages such as Cordova and Eslint.
How did you like Scratch, and how was it going from Scratch to JavaScript?
There's another visual programming language called "Snap!", which is inspired by and similar to Scratch, but has the full power of JavaScript and Scheme, everything's an object, and you can define your own blocks. Plus there are some amazing networking, speech and AI blocks, too! (It has a JavaScript block that makes it very easy to extend and plug in existing JavaScript code.)
I'm interested to know what you think of Snap!, from your perspective of going from Scratch to JavaScript!
AI extensions of Snap! for the eCraft2Learn project:
https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/
>The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project.
Here's more info:
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#264Nice work! I hacked together something similar for the browser after watching a FunFunFunction video about automata, https://brianzelip.github.io/automata
(not ideal on mobile)
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure. I'm always messing around with different projects. I used blocklike.js to jump from Scratch to JavaScript. Then I worked for months on this one game for the app store called Sticky Quest. You can find it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sticky-quest/id1425679649?mt... This how I learned how to use npm packages such as Cordova and Eslint.
You could try expanding this project beyond elementary CAs. One option is a 'totalistic' CA which looks at the average value of a given neighborhood, and can have more than two states. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TotalisticCellularAutomaton.htm... Or you could generate CAs with different starting conditions. Some beautiful elementary CAs don't 'show up' with just one initial point.
The Moveable Feast Machine is similar to cellular automata, but different in some important ways, that make it extremely robust and fault tolerant:
It's a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture.
Robust programs running on massively parallel unreliable hardware can actually tolerate hardware failure and repair themselves. The Demon Hoard Sort algorithm is an inherently robust sorting algorithm for the Moveable Feast Machine.
http://movablefeastmachine.org/
The "Distributed City Generation" video demonstrates a Movable Feast Machine rule that builds a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, with cars that drive between buildings, and city streets that adaptively learn how to route the cars to their nearest destinations, and the city even repairs itself after disasters!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc
Here's some more info:
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#266Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
JS is an objectively bad programming language. It is not fine, it is just annoyingly common and convenient. The main advances in its ecosystem are related to transpiling it from other, saner, languages. If he has fun writing JS, then great for him. He's 12, he'll do it if he wants. But it'd be doing him a disservice not to open his eyes to much wider, greener pastures of the programming world.
JS is a bad language but it's the easiest environment to set up. Back in the day we started with Qbasic not because it is a good language but because that was easy to set up, we all had it and our friends had it and our school computers had it. And JS is less bad a language than Qbasic.
That's debatable.
It's not as if downloading Python and making your first app will take you more than a few seconds, minus download time.
Set up is rarely an issue, once you set up a language even as complex as C++ its completely automated. You press a button and magic happens.
If the biggest selling point of a programming language is that it comes preinstalled with the OS of your choice, its not much of a selling point when the average user downloads and installs GBs of data just to play the latest game hype like Fortnite.
The only people who mind installing stuff are predominately web devs. 99.9% of users out there are fine with it for more than 6 decades now and that wont be changing any time soon.
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#268Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I third this. Speaking from personal experience. I sometimes try to implement the logic of some library or algorithm myself, even if I know there is well-known or canned solution for it. For the same reason as you and your parent comment said. Interestingly, some people (typically newbies who are looking for rewards without commensurate effort. but others too) do not think that way, and even sometimes don't like it i…
>...sometimes don't like it if such suggestions are made I'll admit to occasionally being frustrated by comments like this. It's important to remember that not everyone is looking to learn. Sometimes, they just need to get something done ASAP. It's a bit idealistic to assume that everyone has time to learn the canned solution. The real world doesn't always allow for that.
True. I did not mean it as an absolute statement. I did say above:
>I sometimes try to implement
It's each person's call, on a case-by-case basis. Had just shared my view with that newb, thinking it might help him.
Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.
Thanks for the kind words! Will definitely consider.
Please consider. This is the rare time I'd actually use some sort of !remindme bot. Most lurking autodidacts, I assume, are hoping that you consider it too.
Come out of the woodwork, let him know! If I can, you can.