Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale • Hacker News Board

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#31

Post by cycomachead » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #28

cycomachead wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. I think "just" is oversimplifying a bit of how powerful they can be, but yes all the reporter blocks are shape generic, and we're exploring whether other tools can be as well. Could we build a really intuitive version of np.vectorize? Maybe. :)

Now I am intrigued. Checking it out in detail tonight.

In the File menu inside Snap!, click on libraries and on that list there's an entire APL library that expands upon these ideas. I am no APL expert; this is something really designed more about pushing the limits than something we're actively trying to teach, but there's definitely useful tools in there.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#32

Post by oretoz » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:57 AM UTC

Great. I had read about it but wasn’t sure if it was a better option than Scratch for younger kids. Mine are 6 and 7 and I they use something similar to Scratch. Does anybody know if younger kids use Snap! ?

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#33

Post by andrewstuart » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

This seems like really nice software.

It's a pity that Scratch seems to innovate at a very slow pace - Snap is far ahead of Scratch.

If you are interested in teaching kids to program I can highly recommend Construct 3 and also Code Combat.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#34

Post by brylie » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:15 AM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #33

This seems like really nice software. It's a pity that Scratch seems to innovate at a very slow pace - Snap is far ahead of Scratch. If you are interested in teaching kids to program I can highly recommend Construct 3 and also Code Combat.

It would be really helpful if Scratch would allow projects with multiple scenes. For any moderately involved story or game, there will tend to be multiple scenes or levels. The limitations of a single scene makes it necessary to write many conditional statements to show and hide items or change backdrops when a scene or level changes.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#35

Post by moenig » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:34 AM UTC

brylie wrote: post #34

andrewstuart wrote: post #33

This seems like really nice software. It's a pity that Scratch seems to innovate at a very slow pace - Snap is far ahead of Scratch. If you are interested in teaching kids to program I can highly recommend Construct 3 and also Code Combat.

It would be really helpful if Scratch would allow projects with multiple scenes. For any moderately involved story or game, there will tend to be multiple scenes or levels. The limitations of a single scene makes it necessary to write many conditional statements to show and hide items or change backdrops when a scene or level changes.

Interesting that you should mention the idea of scenes, just as we've begun working on them in Snap!

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#36

Post by moenig » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:52 AM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

That is some seriously impressive improvement on performance and memory use; I'd be interested to know what exactly they did to do that (ex. did they realize they could rearrange something to do the same thing with less work, or is this just a lot of little optimizations adding up?). Also cool, if a little weird to me, to see full-blown map-reduce and APL-like features; I feel like that moves away from the "beginner'…

The memory-footprint and performance improvements basically boil down to a departure from pre-rendering and caching all the graphics to redrawing them just in time. We were delighted to find out that rerendering complex graphical shapes in modern browsers can be done faster and with less memory penalty than pre-rendering and caching.

Here's part of a presentation I drew up earlier this year with a few slides outlining the architectural changes:

https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu/uploads/short-url/a5eBP71x50...

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#37

Post by bharvey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:25 AM UTC

cycomachead wrote: post #31

chewxy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I am intrigued. Checking it out in detail tonight.

In the File menu inside Snap!, click on libraries and on that list there's an entire APL library that expands upon these ideas. I am no APL expert; this is something really designed more about pushing the limits than something we're actively trying to teach, but there's definitely useful tools in there.

I was lucky enough to meet Ken Iverson and Adin Falkoff at age 14 and have been an APL fan ever since, so the APL library has been a labor of love for me! It still needs a lot of work but it's getting the ideas out there.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#38

Post by bharvey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

ladberg wrote: post #9

jansan wrote: post #8

Can anyone tell be in one or two sentences how this relates to Scratch? Is is an alternative, is it used by Scratch, is it something different although it looks very similar?

It's based off Scratch's UI but doesn't share any code. It has a lot more features that delve more into computer science instead of scripting like in Scratch. I believe it was also available in-browser before Scratch was, but I'm not sure.

The first version, BYOB, was an extension of the Scratch 1.4 source code, but since then we have moved in different directions. But we are still inspired by how careful they were in designing visual metaphors for computer science ideas and have tried to extend that care to things like lambda and object inheritance.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#39

Post by bharvey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

brylie wrote: post #34

andrewstuart wrote: post #33

This seems like really nice software. It's a pity that Scratch seems to innovate at a very slow pace - Snap is far ahead of Scratch. If you are interested in teaching kids to program I can highly recommend Construct 3 and also Code Combat.

It would be really helpful if Scratch would allow projects with multiple scenes. For any moderately involved story or game, there will tend to be multiple scenes or levels. The limitations of a single scene makes it necessary to write many conditional statements to show and hide items or change backdrops when a scene or level changes.

Jens wants to do that in Snap! as the next big feature.

Re: Snap! 6 is here, and it's all about scale

#40

Post by bharvey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

cycomachead wrote: post #14

agumonkey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S3 btw do people transition out from snap! ? do they go emacs ? vi ? IDE ?

Most students end up taking a course in another language. At UC Berkeley, they go from Snap! to Python, and it's typically something like VSCode or Sublime as the IDE.

On my when-things-slow-down list is to write a version of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs using Snap! as the language, aimed at high school kids, so replacing the examples that require calculus, for example. I (no doubt naively and arrogantly) can't help feeling that a transition from Snap! to any language that isn't Scheme would be a step downward.