291–300 of 306 posts
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Please post this gif as a show hn, so it gets some attention and maybe someone builds on top of this idea!
See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32130444 (not Show HN, but as it is not that new I thought a retrospective blog post would be more interesting)
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Maybe don't throw -isms around so lightly, eh?
I find hard to interpret "A 40 yo learned something from a 13 yo" in a non ageist way. Seems that people disagree, but nobody has provided a counterpoint. Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.
And I'm not gonna give such classes anymore around this software, a waste of time.
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I find hard to interpret "A 40 yo learned something from a 13 yo" in a non ageist way. Seems that people disagree, but nobody has provided a counterpoint. Actually, the comment in question would have been perfect encouragement in my view just by removing that phrase.
I've only ever heard that term to mean bias against people considered too old for a given activity.
It is great that Scratch can be used as an introduction to programming, but that is not why it was created. It was part of the MIT MediaLab "Computer Clubhouse"[1] project where it would be used to enable a remix culture of cute animations and even simple games. Scratch's implementer, John Maloney, had already helped create a programming environment for kids called EToys[2] using Squeak Smalltalk, just as in the firs…
Mostly these days I do 3D modeling, so I'm using a Blockly version of OpenSCAD:
https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/
but I'd really like to see a nice, stand-alone desktop development environment like to Scratch which isn't encumbered by a sandbox and which is able to write and append to local files and which is easily installed and which runs reliably.
Crashed and burned on pyFlow, Ryven, GraphSCAD, and a bunch of others.
Currently hoping that Nodezator (a node programming system based on pygame) will pan out --- it just needs branches and loops for my purposes:
In the meanwhile, I'm copying OpenSCAD code out of BlockSCAD and pasting it into RapCAD:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/g-code-preview-using-opensc...
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I agree, my 7 year old is into maths at the moment and he found it easier to just use PHP to do basic maths. I sat down with him for about an hour and I printed a "cheat sheet" for the various arithmetic operators (just the basic ones) and he's now quite able to just whack a simple script together and execute it on the command line. Having said that, he wasn't entering the situation completely blind. He's been using…
I think there is great value in being able to write symbols with your own hand. It’s more powerful to us subconsciously to use extra muscles and see something which is distinctly recognisable as our own making. We are losing a lot of enactive cognition by being on screens in chairs; to societal detriment I would wager.
Is there a reason that visual programming languages haven’t taken off for professional programming? I know of several for specific fields (Dark for backends, TouchDesigner for live graphics/multimedia), but none that are more generalised, open, or in wide use. It feels like an underdeveloped area that’s ripe for exploration and experimentation.
There are some systems which try to make it just a straight-forward description --- Drakon Editor comes to mind.
Scalability is an issue --- but screens are larger these days, so may be more workable (I've managed some decently complex models in BlockSCAD:
https://www.blockscad3d.com/community/projects/1385418
A further issue is that if one uses modules/functions, one ends up w/ just a textual description of the algorithm trapped w/in a series of connected/nested blocks.
I prefer to work this way, but I've crashed-burned hard on installation/usage w/ more tools than I can recall off the top of my head (pyFlow, Ryven, GraphSCAD, clikscad, &c.) --- currently I'm just using BlockSCAD and pasting the code into OpenSCAD/RapCAD. I hope that Nodezator (node programming tool done w/ pygame) will work out, but I'm waiting for it to have branches and loops.
I never find the time to dive into it, but for years I carry the thought that somewhere in the general direction of “take the visual programming module of Scratch and make it talk to a cleanly designed high-level API of our business application” lies the key for tremendous feature development productivity, at least for some kinds of features — where from then on, our Product Managers simply go like “oh I know, let’s…
You can use Blockly (Scratch uses a fork of it for the block editor) to do that.