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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

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Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#81

Post by gojomo »

Ygg2 wrote: post #71
gojomo wrote: post #63

Beautiful and inspirational, and yet... Sometimes becoming able to hold the 'invisible state' in memory is the skill to learn. Consider the 'dual N-back' drilling which seems to improve working memory, and then also (by some studies) other testable fluid intelligence. The whole point is holding more and more hidden state in your mind. (To 'show the state' would defeat the purpose of the game.) Similarly, sometimes st…

Having an environment such as one Victor styled for big systems (big as in millions of lines of code), would prove unfeasible (hell auto-complete has a hiccup when lines start getting into hundreds of thousands). Those tools he proposes seem to be very beginner and RAD oriented (even if he claims otherwise). I've seen IDE's choke on smaller code bases and this not only has auto-complete, auto-update but also state/fr…

Yes, in a large system, many of Victor's techniques might only be usable in isolatable areas, like well-mocked unit-tests.

Regarding "some kind of VM that remembers all its previous states", check out 'Omniscient Debugging': http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#82

Post by stdbrouw »

gfodor wrote: post #30

There is nothing new here. Before you downvote, this is actually a huge complement to Bret. As he's said before he is inventing on principle not inventing for you to download and install his latest hack. His principles have been consistent (and, imho, right), and this is another view into them. But, if this opened up some huge new insight for you then you haven't been paying close enough attention. He's always been r…

I don't understand what's wrong with people building on his ideas, taking the subset they think they can implement and, yes, sometimes bastardizing his lofty ideas into quick hacks because something is better than nothing. That's how ideas spread. That's how people get shit done.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#83

Post by theatgrex »

dxbydt wrote: post #73
scott_s wrote: post #33

Programmers, by contrast, have traditionally worked in their heads, first imagining the details of a program, then laboriously coding them. I don't think this describes most real work done by programmers. Rather, what he says we should do, To enable the programmer to achieve increasingly complex feats of creativity, the environment must get the programmer out of her head, by providing an external imagination where th…

Bret has written an amazing article, but the world he inhabits is soooooooooo far away I can't ever imagine getting there in my lifetime. As it stands, programming is barely 2-3 levels of abstraction above shoving bits in registers...sometimes even those few layers are slowing us down and we have to resort to bit shifting operators and native code every once in a while. Whereas he is talking about 20-30 layers of abs…

This is what he is suggesting for learning to program. I don't think he is suggesting that general purpose programming languages be built with these aids ...only an idealized learning language

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#84

Post by joelhooks »

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…

Yes. His approach presents a proper critique with a path forward. I love what KA is doing, but it is going to be iterative (I presume), and I'd hope they are listening to well thought out ideas like this.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#85

Post by Morendil »

One very deep notion in there is "identity within the system". Some people learned it from Smalltalk; I learned it from LambdaMOO.

I respectfully submit that people who are focusing overmuch attention on Light Table "because Bret Victor" are mostly missing the point. As Bret points out, there's a lot you can learn about these things from existing (even old) systems.

If you already know Smalltalk, Logo, HyperCard and Rocky's Boots (I'd missed out on this one but it reminds me of Robot Odyssey which I did play), you could do worse than go and play with LambdaMOO for a little while.

(ETA: it turns out that Roboy Odyssey was a sequel to Rocky's Boots.)

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#86

Post by zmitri »

esperluette wrote: post #50
zmitri wrote: post #31

Cool demos, but very long article for what I thought he was trying to express. Bunch of thoughts, I enjoy thinking about this, so would love some conversation around any of the points: If programming is a way of thinking/problem solving, I'm not sure how supplying the context in line teaches you how to think -- as opposed to sitting down and figuring out a problem on your own. My experience has been that the best way…

I have to disagree ... there are a lot of folks who don't learn well being thrown in at the deep end of "mess around until you understand it", and for whom a Bretian visualization of data would be useful over and over again (especially for bugfinding). And what data needs to be visualized is different for different people; e.g., I can easily visualize most regex, but a lot of people love tools like Rubular because th…

I agree, there are a lot of people who don't learn that well like that. Visual programming makes it a bit more approachable but whether or not it helps learn beyond the first couple lessons (or is overkill) -- I'm not sure. With a lot of these early concepts I feel like just getting one or two reference points can start a snowball effect. Eg. Tell a philosophy student that object orientation is like Plato's Theory of Forms.

From personal experience however I still would argue that just building something is the surest way to go because it requires you to follow through.

After about 2 years of programming full time, I started to develop a sense of why and when things would go wrong up and down the stack, and I don't really think it's something you can teach. It's something you get from loads of accumulated practice -- eg. Oh that's how indices work in Oracle vs MySQL, dynamic proxies on Groovy methods don't work when called from Java, I just built this but now I see I can refactor and save tons of code next time, what are kwargs in python, etc.

I've tested out little one offs like try mongodb, try redis, or interactive js tutorials, but I forget what I've just learned until I need to build something on my own.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#87

Post by andolanra »

mamcx wrote: post #78
andolanra wrote: post #51

As far as learning is concerned, I think this is a wonderful idea. I say this in part because I myself learned on Logo before I taught people everything from Java to Scheme, and even the simplest visualization tools could help immeasurably. For example, we had a tool called the Replacement Modeller that would visualize evaluation and substitution in pure-functional Scheme snippets, which was great for stepping throug…

I'm toying in build a new language (more in the "find ideas" than really doing it), and tough: Why I can't have events on functions? ie: Why I can't attach listener to the entry/exit of a function, in a transparent way (from https://gist.github.com/3777791 , where is still ugly as hell): def startDef: self.cache['start'] = now def endDef: performance.register(self.function.__name,'time', now - self.cache['start']) ho…

You'll be wanting to look at defadvice in Common Lisp and elisp, then, which let you attach code to the entry and exit of a function. Python has decorators, as well, which are similar, but the entire purpose of defadvice is to do exactly what you're talking about.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#88

Post by macrael »

theatgrex wrote: post #83
dxbydt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bret has written an amazing article, but the world he inhabits is soooooooooo far away I can't ever imagine getting there in my lifetime. As it stands, programming is barely 2-3 levels of abstraction above shoving bits in registers...sometimes even those few layers are slowing us down and we have to resort to bit shifting operators and native code every once in a while. Whereas he is talking about 20-30 layers of abs…

This is what he is suggesting for learning to program. I don't think he is suggesting that general purpose programming languages be built with these aids ...only an idealized learning language

Read the end of the article. He definitely thinks this is the future of programming.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#89

Post by yaxu »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75
yaxu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Bret Victor says in his essay, live coding is not a new concept and he did not create it. The current trend in live coding seems to have spawned from a discussion between two computer musicians (Fabrice Mogini and Julian Rohrhuber) in 2001, with masses of related prior art going back to Lisp machines, Self, Smalltalk, corewar etc.

Responsive live programming (not just code reload), which is closer to what Bret Victor is doing here, goes back to various visual languages of the 80s and 90s.

Like the ones I mentioned.

Re: Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

#90

Post by yaxu »

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…

He's also being naive about live coding as a whole: http://toplap.org/?p=212
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