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Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#11

Post by chadkeck »

mquander wrote: post #5

A lot of people are pretty skeptical about visual programming, because it's been tried often, and it seems like text is a natural way to express complicated programs; easy to see a lot at once, easy to create quickly with the keyboard, simple to share, simple to search, and easy to make changes in multiple places with things like regular expressions. What do you think your visual environment has to offer over a textu…

WizBang is designed to teach the most basic programming fundamentals: loops, conditional branches, numeric operations, and how these blocks interact with eachother.

I am in no way trying to get any current developer to switch over to building programs in WizBang. This was never an intention. The goal is to present a simple, minimal, visual environment in which to build simple programs.

After the beginner learns the basics, WizBang eases them into the next step of learning a real language, such as C++, Java, or Python, by allowing them to compile their WizBang programs into valid code in any language that's supported.

To answer your final question: the only advantage WizBang has over a textual language is that I think there are more grade school (and even high school) students that would experiment building programs with colorful shapes than typing commands into a text editor, then running a compiler or interpreter to see what they get.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#12

Post by chadkeck »

jpwagner wrote: post #10

since your comments in this thread indicate that you are insistent this is for beginners, maybe you should go ask beginners. get out of my building... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869827

It is definitely intended for beginners, but I wanted to let HN know about it since I've seen a lot of posts wondering "how I can teach my kid to program?" and think that this is a good app for that.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#13

Post by chadkeck »

edw519 wrote: post #8

Which, I hope, will allow more students to get excited about programming, instead of being scared away by compiler errors. I applaud you for your concern and effort, but I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. Do you really want to encourage someone who would be "scared away by compiler errors"? Compiling is easy, deploying is much harder. If someone is scared away by the easy stuff, how will they respond…

I don't think WizBang could ever take away the beginner running into compiler errors, but I feel that the beginner programmer has so many problems to face at once that this situation can be improved. By using WizBang, they can interactively learn about looping and branches without worrying about syntax.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#15

Post by [deleted] »

chadkeck wrote: post #12
jpwagner wrote: post #10

since your comments in this thread indicate that you are insistent this is for beginners, maybe you should go ask beginners. get out of my building... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869827

It is definitely intended for beginners, but I wanted to let HN know about it since I've seen a lot of posts wondering "how I can teach my kid to program?" and think that this is a good app for that.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#16

Post by elblanco »

chadkeck wrote: post #7
elblanco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scratch is a neat system. But I found it to be slower than just typing code. I know that's not the point, but my thinking is that doing something graphically with lego blocks should be faster than typing out all the characters one at a time. I've worked a bit with graphical dataflow systems (like LabView) that can actually realize a much quicker time to operation than hashing out equivalent code by hand.

It is much slower for me to build a WizBang program than to fire up vim and write some code. I'm not sure if visual programming could ever be faster than a text editor, as a visual block (in WizBang anyway) usually corresponds to one or two lines of actual code. But speed is not the point at all in WizBang. The point is to present a clean and simple environment in which beginners can build real programs without havin…

This is definitely a cool project. I think, introduced the right way it would certainly work along your intended concept.

There have been a few attempts at pushing the complexity down so that non-programmers can work with complex things. Like Data Flow programming systems for example.

Showing somebody how to build a simple data processing app in one of these systems is very rewarding as they realize they can coax the machine to do what they are telling it. But I've mostly dealt with adults, not kids.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#17

Post by jlees »

I like the idea, definitely the sort of thing you want to get used by school-age students not 'proper' computer scientists though. Recently was reminded of just how damn easy it was to do the most basic of programming in the BBC Micro era; no real syntax, no complexity, but in 10 seconds you could write something that printed 'JOE ROCKS' infinitely on the page. If this has the same level of just-do-it, and sufficient sample starting points, it could be really cool.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#18

Post by chadkeck »

gommm wrote: post #14

Seems like an interesting project to teach complete beginners. I'll test it out to see if it can help my girlfriend understand more about programing...

Great! There isn't much instruction on what to do once it's installed, so I recommend opening up the examples (available from the sourceforge files page) to get an idea how the blocks behave.

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#19

Post by chadkeck »

jlees wrote: post #17

I like the idea, definitely the sort of thing you want to get used by school-age students not 'proper' computer scientists though. Recently was reminded of just how damn easy it was to do the most basic of programming in the BBC Micro era; no real syntax, no complexity, but in 10 seconds you could write something that printed 'JOE ROCKS' infinitely on the page. If this has the same level of just-do-it, and sufficient…

I just wanted to know if any actual computer scientists had input on the project's goals. I have looked into Alice, scratch, Popfly (discontinued), and couldn't really find one that was very similar to WizBang, so I was also thinking putting it on HN would dig out any project that was amazingly similar.

Edit: scratch, not squeak

Re: Ask HN Computer Scientists: could my app make the world a better place?

#20

Post by hernan7 »

I'm no computer scientist, hope I can comment anyway...

Maybe add some graphics capability a la Logo? That way, you can see the turtle and the program going at the same time.

Also, some kind of labelling/commenting of the different "areas" of the program -- that can then be translated to comments to the code.

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