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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

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Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#171

Post by wamatt »

russelluresti wrote: post #168
russelluresti wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's amazing how many people have a problem with the idea of testing a solution. I'm simply saying that assumptions need to be challenged and assertions need data to back them up. I'm not saying any of this ideas are inherently wrong, I'm saying they're unproven. If you down-vote simply because I believe a person should offer proof when they make a claim, you're falling victim to your own biases.

>"I'm simply saying that assumptions need to be challenged and assertions need data to back them up. "

I hope you have a study to backup that assertion.. :p

(Hint: not all knowledge is empirical)

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#173

Post by readymade »

russelluresti wrote: post #167
readymade wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khan Academy and Bret Victor are apples and oranges -- they're not even playing the same game. In order to make any major strides, we have to reconcile the need for PRODUCTS, NOW! with the conceptual, exploratory approach taken here. Real world innovation often makes very small tweaks on proven formulae, whereas bold new ideas can have a long incubation period with seemingly little payoff at first. It's roughly the d…

I disagree that real-world innovation isn't tested, iterated on, and improved. Look at flight and the Wright Brothers. They didn't just run numbers and present ideas. They built prototypes and tested their assumptions. That's what Bret needs to do. He needs to build, test, iterate, and improve upon his ideas.

I think you're misreading my reply. It's not that real world innovation isn't tested and iterated on, quite the opposite. The Wright Brothers are exactly that model and I don't dispute that at all.

What I'm drawing a distinction between is this approach to innovation, which is necessarily iterative and based on incremental improvements to prior art, and another approach which makes larger conceptual leaps and may not have obvious initial practicality. I described these two approaches as being roughly comparable to "business and research", although I admit that's a somewhat crude dichotomy. It is the latter camp that I think Victor falls in.

Both are relevant. For every Wright Brothers you also have a Tim Berners Lee, whose invention was developed in an international research laboratory (not a startup) and was largely ingored by the public for several years. It took the perfect storm of the late 90s Internet boom for the web to develop into the thing we recognize today.

In any case, it's not as though Victor has been doing nothing but writing papers and photoshopping mockups. If you look for them, you can find videos of him giving talks where he is demonstrating real, live software that implements his ideas. He has been refining them in practice for several years now, and others (such as Light Table's Chris Granger) are doing the same. The question is whether they will catch on, and the jury is still out as far as that's concerned.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#174

Post by bad_user » 

    Imagine if the microwave encouraged you to randomly
    hit buttons until you figured out what they did.
I don't have to imagine, because that's precisely what I did when I was a child. As a result, at 6 years old I was the only one in my family able to configure a video player.

Of course, I've lost my patience since then and I rely more and more on already known concepts, but that's one reason why children learn faster than grownups - because they start with a blank slate, they have no preconceptions, no biases, have no fear of experiments and of failure. You only need to watch a child learn how to ride a bike, then compare it with a grown-up doing the same.

Parents are also privileged to watch their children learn how to use everyday language. The most marvelous thing happens right before your eyes - as your child does not need to learn the grammar rules, or to read from a dictionary or to take lessons from a tutor. And during this time all they are doing is listen, then trying out words by themselves to see how you behave.

And you really can't compare a microwave with a programming language. A microwave is just a stupid appliance with a bunch of buttons for controlling a state machine. A programming language on the other hand is a language that can describe anything. And I don't know what the best method is for teaching programming, but we could probably take some hints from people that learn foreign languages, especially children.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#177

Post by Too »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #107
ChuckMcM wrote: post #57

I really enjoyed Bret's article. I don't necessarily agree with all of it but the main argument is quite sound. Bret writes: "People understand what they can see." which is true for some people but not true for all people. I've got one daughter who is very verbal, one very visual. They learn differently. This in a minor nit though, his exploration of the 'code' / 'example' model is good. I particularly liked the comm…

Ah, but doesn't this have the same problems all NLP systems have? It gives illusion of flexibility that gets shattered every time user allows himself to believe in it. What if I prefer to write them in different order? Or if some version of named parameters is in use, what if I like some other synonym for height? Strict syntax is a good thing as long as it is also brittle. Now, an IDE that generates a training text l…

> Now, an IDE that generates a training text like that on the fly and allows you to fill in the values without actually storing the training text would be nice. Something like intellisence popups, but inline and expanded.

That's the best idea i've heard in a long time. The IDE already has the information but hovering every function call with the mouse to get parameter information is a PITA and breaks the flow of reading. A hotkey to inline them on all your code at once would be brilliant.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#178

Post by [deleted] »

mattmcknight wrote: post #111
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 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.

[deleted]
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