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Very interesting! So the language looks similar to Scratch and Blockly, but targeted to mobile web. I would like to see a comparison overview. Anyone have a link to a published paper? This is from Microsoft Research so I would expect there to be one, eventually, relating this to similar efforts.
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TouchDevelop has been around for quite a while; I remember first installing it on my WP7 phone back in 2012. I'm very happy to see the editor open-sourced. I think this is a great example of Microsoft's new-found desire to promote learning and openness, rather than fight against it as they did in the past. My opinion of them over the past few years has slowly been swinging towards positive, and even though I'll likel…
All that glitters isn't gold. Wake me up when Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Visual Studio a cross platform development suite. We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.
I mean it's not everything, give them a little time though.
This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long long time. If I remember correctly Microsoft released something similar for Windows Phone but the UI was really clunky. This version (?) is amazing though, so much better. I've just spent 10 minutes playing around and building a simple app sat on my sofa, I highly recommend spending a little bit of time using this.
There's very good precedence too with Scratch and it's derivative Android App Inventor (currently App Inventor 2), but it's nice that this is platform independent! (it does miss out on some cool things that are platform dependent, like fiddling with sensors and communication) https://scratch.mit.edu/ http://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu/ GUI-oriented programming has much to offer and I'm excited in developments in this are…
Scratch was quite nice, we used the offline version. Sometimes it would corrupt our files though, ugh.
AppInventor was also quite nice to use except that the internet slowed down quite a bit when 20 people used it at once. It was not quite well-made as Scratch imo.
Generally the people didn't care that much about learning this stuff, few if any got interested in programming through these, sadly.
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Don't you think having your hands in front of the screen is inherently problematic? It's hard to image where that would enhance efficiency.
Input of Chinese/Japanese characters.
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TouchDevelop has been around for quite a while; I remember first installing it on my WP7 phone back in 2012. I'm very happy to see the editor open-sourced. I think this is a great example of Microsoft's new-found desire to promote learning and openness, rather than fight against it as they did in the past. My opinion of them over the past few years has slowly been swinging towards positive, and even though I'll likel…
All that glitters isn't gold. Wake me up when Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Visual Studio a cross platform development suite. We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TouchDevelop has been around for quite a while; I remember first installing it on my WP7 phone back in 2012. I'm very happy to see the editor open-sourced. I think this is a great example of Microsoft's new-found desire to promote learning and openness, rather than fight against it as they did in the past. My opinion of them over the past few years has slowly been swinging towards positive, and even though I'll likel…
All that glitters isn't gold. Wake me up when Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Visual Studio a cross platform development suite. We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.
Still, very nice.
(Now I wonder if there's a service that allows you to list intersection of contributer to github projects... hmm.. there's an api, isn't there:)
npm install -g json
cons=(https://api.github.com/repos/{LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel,Microsoft/TouchDevelop}/contributors)
comm -12 for thing in ["cat","dog","tree"]:
print thing
I'm curious if others feel the same way or not? Have people had success starting with something like TouchDevelop and then transition to a non-visual language? Or do kids just get good at playing in the visual sandbox and never make the jump?
I looked at this a while ago while seeking out a good language for my daughter to learn some simple programming with. While I liked it, I can't help feeling that all these "visual" substitutes for programming languages are counter productive. It is so tedious to create even simple loops and logical structures. Consider a simple for loop such as in python: for thing in ["cat","dog","tree"]: print thing I can explain t…
I was intimidated by the idea of using a real language, instead I liked just pointing/clicking my way through things. This was the case until I wanted to make something sufficiently complicated that doing it in RPG Maker would create spaghetti code.
For me, after spending years playing with RPGMaker 2000 (I was 11 when I started), moving onto a real programming language like Python was completely effortless. It was a transition from "I need to click this to make this if-condition" to "I need to write this if-condition here".
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>The way the tutorials are setup will actually be handy for education, certainly if it would be possible to create your own tutorial. WOW, that's a good idea. The amount of work (and other resources) that goes in to creating a high quality online tutorial really is much more than is required to teach a concept well. Making tutorial-making easy would be a HUGE win.
I had the same thought and found they have a section of the website devoted to this. Very nice. https://www.touchdevelop.com/docs/creatinginteractivetutoria...