On 2011-06-15, at 3:22 AM, BGB wrote: > and, meanwhile, recent output has been net negative...
Nothing wrong with that, we learn to write better, tighter code and get rid of the old cruft. Some of the best code I've seen has been written with the delete key... > a mystery though is how generally "off putting" the school experience can be > to people... > I generally remember these years of my life to be just plain dismal (I really > don't know how people can find much enjoyment in all this...). Don't get me started on how bad school can be for turning kids off from learning. No mystery to it, helping kids learn just really isn't part of what schools were designed for, despite using that as a story to sell them to the public. One more point that is more on topic: Using the Scratch block-based visual programming, I saw that an eight year old was able to download, read, understand, and modify successfully (i.e., make the changes he desired/anticipated) pretty much any code he found on the Scratch site. Not too many languages I can say that for, even with adults. Not all of that can be attributed to the visual nature -- Scratch is also very tightly constrained and the limits can aid understanding too, as well as picking the right abstractions to represent with blocks, but it was impressive and I think the fact that the blocks show visually the structure and behaviour (sets of blocks tied to a specific sprite, blocks highlight as they are run) of the program does help considerably in being able to read, understand, and maintain someone else's code. In fact, I'm interested enough in the block structure visualization that I've been porting just the blocks, without the Scratch semantics and runtime, to the web. You can use scratch-like blocks to write and output any language, provided a language plugin. As a demonstration, I'm writing a language plugin for Javascript (plus Raphael, for graphics) and Martyn Eggleton is working on a plugin for writing Arduino code. It is still early days, very alpha, but if anyone is interested there is more here: https://github.com/dethe/waterbear/wiki [info] https://github.com/dethe/waterbear/ [code] https://waterbearlang.com/ [Javascript demo] http://stretch.deedah.org/waterbear/ [Arduino demo] I've been meaning to share this with the group here, but wanting to get it roughed in a bit more, but here it is in all its half-baked glory. Feedback highly appreciated. --Dethe _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
