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Microsoft TouchDevelop

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Re: Microsoft TouchDevelop

#71

Post by turingbook »

rifung wrote: post #57
YorkianTones wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Research is strongly expected to have an impact on the business side of things. It just so happens that Microsoft is willing to incubate projects like Midori* that have long runways (decade+) and may completely fail. The hope is that some new emerging tech long plays will become huge business boons (Cortana, Kinect, ..). There's lots of investment in NLP, vision, and OS research over at MSR. As far as other…

Is it? I suppose I just assumed it wasn't expected to have any impact on the business side of things as they are the only company (again besides IBM) that does research in theoretical computer science. Not only that but they publish all their results in public. I know that Google also does a lot of R&D but from what I can tell, it's usually directly related to what they are doing.

Peter Norvig wrote an article "Google's Hybrid Approach to Research" http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/38149.pdf

Re: Microsoft TouchDevelop

#73

Post by baggers »

I'm very glad this project is available but somewhat surprised how in awe some comments are here. How does this do a better job at teaching than etoys? Yes being able to deploy easily is a big deal, but given the length of time the smalltalk/squeak/etoys folks have been working on this idea I don't see how this project is garnering the level of admiration it is from HN folks.

Re: Microsoft TouchDevelop

#74

Post by GuiA »

amelius wrote: post #51
rifung wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like this was made by Microsoft Research. I'd argue Microsoft Research's very existence shows Microsoft is heavily invested in the future, more so than any other tech company as far as I know. Maybe besides IBM I dont know any other company that still funds research which isn't expected to have some relationship to the business side of things.

They do so because all serious researchers will want to publish, as part of their career building process. Therefore I can't understand what type of researcher would want to work for a more closed company like e.g. Apple.

The ones who care about building stuff in an environment that's more or less the only one of its kind, and where the definition of a successful research project isn't "we published a paper" but rather "we enabled a product that hundreds of millions of people will use more so than any other object in their life".

Re: Microsoft TouchDevelop

#75

Post by GuiA »

Moter8 wrote: post #63
darkmighty wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We used both these in what would be 11th year / Age 16-17 (1º de Bachillerato) in IT class (optional) in my highschool which is located in Spain. 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. Generall…

16-17 is a little too old for Scratch. I've run dozens of Scratch workshops, and they've managed to deeply engage the students, but they work best with kids under 13 or so. Web programming, RPG Maker/Game Maker, Python/Ruby, Processing, and Arduino are some platforms that work better with teenagers.
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