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Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

haskelllive.com

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Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#11

Post by spacemanaki »

prezjordan wrote: post #7

This is awesome. Nice and approachable - well explained. I'd love if you also threw in some vim commands along the way.

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general.

An unobtrusive way to introduce editor tips that just came to mind would be to add subtitles with selected key-combos that might be nontrivial or not obvious. More than that would be a distraction, I think. Also, I don't know if YouTube supports multiple subtitle tracks... so that might be a big fu to deaf or hearing impaired programmers who want to follow along.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#12

Post by codegeek »

runn1ng wrote: post #8

I have to say, I generally dislike video coding tutorials. First, it's difficult to google/copy-paste. Second, it just goes against the way I learn new programming languages - I generally read it, then try it, then experiment with it in some other ways, list few pages back/forth, experiment more, fail, then continue. Usually copypasting/rewriting chunks of code. "What happens when I do THAT? Oh, it fails miserably. W…

"I can never actually learn any language from a video tutorial."

I like video tutorials/screencasts as long as they have the following :

1. Trainer starts with a basic list of topics/table of contents. Nothing fancy but give me an overall overview of what I will learn out of this.

2. A particular topic is taught gradually i.e. by starting with a simpler or even wrong way (as in best practices) and then improving it to show the more standard way. For don't just show me the final end product.Show me how to do it in a crude/simpler way, then improve the code (may be refactor etc) or add more features. Explain each improvement while you are doing it and WHY you are doing it.This makes us learn the gotchas and pitfalls and may be even best practices.For example, I can put all the code in one file to start with but then how can/should I refactor it in some recommended way? (MVC?)

2. Show me more than 1 way of doing something if it helps me learn the concept. Again, kind of related to #1.

3. Break the code on purpose and explain what the error message means. Then fix it and re-run. For example, in learning Django/Flask, if you are missing a template, it will crash/error out. So don't create the template right away. Build the code without template and let me see how it crashes. Then add the template and re-run to show me success.

4. Unless you are teaching design specifically, save the HTML/CSS/JS tricks/enhancements for the end. Show me the core product.

I am sure there are more but these help me a lot personally. In fact, I am learning Python/Flask right now and looking to write my own tutorials on how I learnt it.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#13

Post by Avalaxy »

spacemanaki wrote: post #11
prezjordan wrote: post #7

This is awesome. Nice and approachable - well explained. I'd love if you also threw in some vim commands along the way.

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general. An unobt…

Yes I wouldn't like it either because I don't use vim.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#15

Post by johnpmayer »

runn1ng wrote: post #8

I have to say, I generally dislike video coding tutorials. First, it's difficult to google/copy-paste. Second, it just goes against the way I learn new programming languages - I generally read it, then try it, then experiment with it in some other ways, list few pages back/forth, experiment more, fail, then continue. Usually copypasting/rewriting chunks of code. "What happens when I do THAT? Oh, it fails miserably. W…

While certainly anecdotal, I attribute 99% of my opengl knowledge to the extremely comprehensive WebGL 101 videos by emoller. The video was two hours long, but it took me about 8 to get through as I copied code, made changes I liked, and made sure it compiled at each milestone.

Of course, opengl/webgl isn't a language, and the hand-holding might be more necessary.

Finally, all of his code (each finished milestone, of which there were at least a dozen) was available on github.

For the lazy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me3BviH3nZc

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#16

Post by Oxryly »

Very cool. I don't have many Haskell coders where I spend my time, so it is nice to watch how someone with more experience tackles fairly basic programming tasks. The guard window and quickcheck in particular were eye-opening.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#17

Post by Oxryly »

spacemanaki wrote: post #11
prezjordan wrote: post #7

This is awesome. Nice and approachable - well explained. I'd love if you also threw in some vim commands along the way.

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general. An unobt…

Seconded. Devote a short episode to tools, but don't mix the tools and programming too much.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#18

Post by prezjordan »

spacemanaki wrote: post #11
prezjordan wrote: post #7

This is awesome. Nice and approachable - well explained. I'd love if you also threw in some vim commands along the way.

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general. An unobt…

Great suggestion, that's on par with what I had in mind. I was not implying OP should have a 3-minute segment on vim commands. Maybe just casually say "and I'm going to use :tab which allows me to select multiple lines and line up the equal signs" or something similar.

Re: Haskell Live: A Live Coding Adventure

#20

Post by spacemanaki »

prezjordan wrote: post #18
spacemanaki wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to respectfully offer another opinion: I would NOT love if it some vim commands were thrown in. By all means, devote a single episode to tools, since the set up demonstrated might be complex to recreate, and it would likely be something a lot of people want to use too. But I don't think tips specific to a single editor have any place in screencasts that are about one programming language in general. An unobt…

Great suggestion, that's on par with what I had in mind. I was not implying OP should have a 3-minute segment on vim commands. Maybe just casually say "and I'm going to use :tab which allows me to select multiple lines and line up the equal signs" or something similar.

> Maybe just casually say "and I'm going to use :tab which allows me to select multiple lines and line up the equal signs" or something similar.

No, I wouldn't want them to casually say anything... that's why the subtitles would be an unobtrusive compromise, since you can just turn them off. I think this would be even more important if the screencast was targeted at new users of the language or framework or whatever, since the viewer might be confused and wonder if ":tab" was something to do with the syntax of the language.

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