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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

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Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#121

Post by neilk »

dxbydt wrote: post #73
scott_s wrote: post #33

Programmers, by contrast, have traditionally worked in their heads, first imagining the details of a program, then laboriously coding them. I don't think this describes most real work done by programmers. Rather, what he says we should do, To enable the programmer to achieve increasingly complex feats of creativity, the environment must get the programmer out of her head, by providing an external imagination where th…

Bret has written an amazing article, but the world he inhabits is soooooooooo far away I can't ever imagine getting there in my lifetime. As it stands, programming is barely 2-3 levels of abstraction above shoving bits in registers...sometimes even those few layers are slowing us down and we have to resort to bit shifting operators and native code every once in a while. Whereas he is talking about 20-30 layers of abs…

I don't think that Bret is advocating that this is the way all programming should be. That would be strictly impossible, as some functions have totally non-linear effects on their output, so you couldn't easily connect one to the other with handy arrows and highlighted stuff.

The geometry example is chosen because it's easy to make a mapping between the space of function inputs and visual outputs. And each parameter is independent of each other.

Khan Academy has already implemented some of this for JavaScript, running right in the browser.

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/drawing-bonus-rotation/9064481...

Try clicking on the coloration functions to see previews, or sweeping with the mouse to change the values.

As for the more advanced features, many languages exist today which make this quite possible, at least for teaching tools. Even well-commented Java has the kind of typing and documentation culture that would allow you to implement a lot of this today.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#122

Post by russelluresti »

bretthopper wrote: post #24

There's already two comments here about being "harsh" or "ungracious" towards Khan Academy which is ridiculous. The usual HN article that contains criticisms is usually limited to that. Some rant that took 10 minutes to write and contains nothing constructive. Bret Victor put an insane amount of time into this (I can only assume) and is truly advancing mindsets about programming tools and learning. We should all be t…

Here's my issue with the "advancement" that Bret is doing. It's all conjecture. He has no product. He has no users. He has theories. Theories that sound good to you and me, but, ultimately, theories that are untested and unproven. There's no evidence that any of these changes would actually help anyone learn to program any better. Who is to say that a person new to coding wouldn't be overwhelmed by the amount of information Bret's system is asking them to process? There's a pretty strong case for cognitive overload when you have lines of code, different code hints that appear not just over every line, but every function and number, a time bar with many different symbols on it, etc. But, again, no benefits or faults can be found with Bret's proposed approach because it's untested and unproven. Conjecture, hypotheses, and assumptions.

This is where Khan Academy exceeds. They have users. They have real people really trying to learn how to code. This means they can test their assumptions and modify their approach. An imperfect solution delivered today is better than a perfect solution delivered next week.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#123

Post by pacala »

chipsy wrote: post #117
mattmcknight wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just found the analogy of a microwave with blank buttons turned me off as being an unnecessary rhetorical straw man. I know what fill means, and I know what ellipse means, and I know what numbers are. Discovering what those words mean in a different context is not analogous to blank buttons.

Okay, but what is ellipse(50,25,32,5)? "ellipse" and numbers are only hints, just as blank buttons and dials are only hints. Programmers rely a lot on IDE support now to see the parameters...which is exactly what Bret is talking about!

The comparison is still shallow. It is regrettable that most programming languages don't support named parameters, but it's fairly trivial to imagine a language and api:

DrawEllipse(x=50, y=25, width=32, height=5)

No real-time rendering and tracing of values required (I hope!). Furthermore, a decent IDE will bring in the method doc blurb, so the programer has a richer context to make an informed decision.

I appreciate the work Brett put into the article and I'm half way pre-convinced myself. At the end I was somewhat disappointed because most of the stuff he talks about is already present in a decent IDE, perhaps in a less polished form, but present nonetheless.

The deeper put-off is that the article seems to advocate not thinking, instead performing random walks using shiny tools. If someone can't think about their code, no amount of visualizations is going to help. That being said, the potential of enhancing one's thinking abilities by properly chosen visualizations is tantalizing, but I don't think the article makes a good case for it and I haven't yet seen a better approach than old school pen and paper.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#124

Post by russelluresti »

AdamFernandez wrote: post #32
bretthopper wrote: post #24

There's already two comments here about being "harsh" or "ungracious" towards Khan Academy which is ridiculous. The usual HN article that contains criticisms is usually limited to that. Some rant that took 10 minutes to write and contains nothing constructive. Bret Victor put an insane amount of time into this (I can only assume) and is truly advancing mindsets about programming tools and learning. We should all be t…

I agree, and would add that Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws with the method Khan Academny uses to teach programming (live coding environments, javascript, and processing languages, which other teaching products happen to use as well). He is not criticizing Khan Academy as a whole directly, as the quality or lack thereof of Khan Academy itself is never brought into question or even dis…

> Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws

Where are the numbers? Where's the testing? Where's the proof that his proposed changes are more effective in teaching a new programmer? Validity comes through numbers, proof, and evidence.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#125

Post by [deleted] »

adrusi wrote: post #104

If such an environment ever existed, it would be amazing. But I can't think of any way that such an environment could exist without having to program a new environment for every problem. Not from scratch, of course, a lot of core concepts could be abstracted out, but even with all the abstractions in place, and all the libraries presenting a standard interface, I'd imagine few thousand lines for the features describe…

[deleted]

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#126

Post by paulclinger »

adrusi wrote: post #104

If such an environment ever existed, it would be amazing. But I can't think of any way that such an environment could exist without having to program a new environment for every problem. Not from scratch, of course, a lot of core concepts could be abstracted out, but even with all the abstractions in place, and all the libraries presenting a standard interface, I'd imagine few thousand lines for the features describe…

There are already environments that allow to implement something similar to what Bret is showing. 4 months ago after watching Bret's Inventing on Principle I put together a quick demo of live coding in Lua (http://notebook.kulchenko.com/zerobrane/live-coding-in-lua-b...). The demo is executed in ZeroBrane Studio IDE (http://studio.zerobrane.com/) and it works with any Lua application (although with some limitations); for example, another screencast shows live coding with Love2d (http://studio.zerobrane.com/tutorials.html) using the same IDE.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#127

Post by chj »

bretthopper wrote: post #24

There's already two comments here about being "harsh" or "ungracious" towards Khan Academy which is ridiculous. The usual HN article that contains criticisms is usually limited to that. Some rant that took 10 minutes to write and contains nothing constructive. Bret Victor put an insane amount of time into this (I can only assume) and is truly advancing mindsets about programming tools and learning. We should all be t…

If I were a developer from KA, I would be very grateful for this kind of crticism, no matter how harsh it is. Bret basically did a lot of free research work for them. Some of the ideas are hard to implement, but there are quite a few things that can easily be added to their products.

Inovative ideas are rare and fragile. We should be thankful someone sharing them.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#128

Post by chj »

russelluresti wrote: post #122
bretthopper wrote: post #24

There's already two comments here about being "harsh" or "ungracious" towards Khan Academy which is ridiculous. The usual HN article that contains criticisms is usually limited to that. Some rant that took 10 minutes to write and contains nothing constructive. Bret Victor put an insane amount of time into this (I can only assume) and is truly advancing mindsets about programming tools and learning. We should all be t…

Here's my issue with the "advancement" that Bret is doing. It's all conjecture. He has no product. He has no users. He has theories. Theories that sound good to you and me, but, ultimately, theories that are untested and unproven. There's no evidence that any of these changes would actually help anyone learn to program any better. Who is to say that a person new to coding wouldn't be overwhelmed by the amount of info…

I am a user of his ideas. I read through his article without taking a break, which rarely happen these days.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#129

Post by kamaal »

russelluresti wrote: post #124
AdamFernandez wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and would add that Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws with the method Khan Academny uses to teach programming (live coding environments, javascript, and processing languages, which other teaching products happen to use as well). He is not criticizing Khan Academy as a whole directly, as the quality or lack thereof of Khan Academy itself is never brought into question or even dis…

> Brett Victor is pointing out what he perceives to be valid flaws Where are the numbers? Where's the testing? Where's the proof that his proposed changes are more effective in teaching a new programmer? Validity comes through numbers, proof, and evidence.

You could say say something similar about UI design of things like iPhone.

Some times you have to show people what they want. And then when they see, they would know how awesome things are.

Not all projects are started after research and data. That way many projects would never start.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#130

Post by greggman »

Wow! What an awesome critique. I'm in awe.

First off, rather than just saying Khan Academy missed the point, Mr. Victor goes over in extreme detail with full examples with ideas on how to do it better.

Second, he really went into some detail about how to think about things. Not just the solutions but ideas and ways of thinking to come up with better solutions.

Third, he's set the bar for critiques higher than I've ever seen. Next time I want to critique something I'm going to feel at least some responsibility to give good and clear examples of both what I think is wrong and what I think would be better with reasons.

Fourth, even if I never write software to help learning programming or help programming advance in general I'll certainly be influenced in my API and system designs by this post.

Thank you Mr. Victor

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