61–70 of 88 posts
Why not for 3 eur buy some basic arduino or other tiny hardware to tinker with and for another few eur, tiny i2c/oled display, wires and set of basic switches? You start programming with option to expand to the larger project in the future. You have constraints of real device, community is much larger and there are more learning resources.
- a manual
- an installer
when you have Web pages can now
- be offline (PWA)
- be responsive and run on pretty much any device
- run pretty much anything thanks to WASM but anyway already have JS/HTML/CSS as bare minimum
- can have the instructions AND the runtime on the same page, on any device, instantly
- can connect with physical hardware, see recent https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/web-serial-support-in-fire... or even with APIs.
I don't get why this kind of projects need : - a manual - an installer when you have Web pages can now - be offline (PWA) - be responsive and run on pretty much any device - run pretty much anything thanks to WASM but anyway already have JS/HTML/CSS as bare minimum - can have the instructions AND the runtime on the same page, on any device, instantly - can connect with physical hardware, see recent https://hacks.mozi…
Apparently not that friendly on HN :-D
I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user. IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is no…
Not sure on the performance but it might be possible to port this Mini Micro to those platforms.
Also check out Pico8 and Picotron. https://www.lexaloffle.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think indentation is more intuitive. Even people using languages that use braces or similar usually use indentation to make code readable. If doing that you end up explaining both ideas (use braces and indent).
I get why people like indentation for this. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer and it’s a matter of personal preference. That said, my preference is curly braces (or whatever) because I’ve found indentation is often a bother. Yes, most of the time you use indentation together with braces, but not every time. There are many occasions where code is clearer without (or with custom) indentation. Furthermore, i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. How would the friction inherent in conflating layout and semantics together depend on the experience level the programmer? Different programmers might have different ways of dealing with that friction, but I'd think its existence would be a property of the language itself.
The form/function distinction you're making requires the ability to hold two parallel representations of the same code in your head—the visual representation (what it looks like) and the syntactic representation (what it means to the parser), and to know that they're related but different. This is a higher level skill. When you're starting out, the best form to express to other humans is probably the one you're expre…
My supposition here is that the threshold of skill needed to understand the form/function distinction here is significantly lower than you expect it to be. In written natural language, people don't typically attach semantic meaning to things like indententation, kerning, letter spacing, text alignment, font size, etc., and usually distinguish style from semantics intuitively without having to apply any conscious decision rules. Distinguishing form from content is something we do by nature.
I'd expect that at least those already familiar with natural writing in most modern languages will have a bias toward expecting that whitespace does not have semantic value, while punctuation marks do. Conversely, I'd expect recognizing cases where indentation does control logic flow to be what requires a higher skill level.
I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user. IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is no…
It's a BASIC interpreter/OS for the RP2040