λ Snap – An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study
Posted by dr_kiszonka 1 day ago
Comments
Comment by aspizu 1 day ago
That is what eventually led me to build goboscript: https://github.com/aspizu/goboscript
I'm one of the programmers who owe their career to Scratch, this year, I joined https://ente.com as a software engineer. Scratch taught me how to code, and perhaps a bit of real-world engineering indirectly.
Comment by varun_ch 1 day ago
I also know that one of the important developers for the Asahi Linux drivers also started on Scratch. I think there’s a lot of real software engineers who started on Scratch (and the Scratch community, which is often overlooked)
Comment by psyklic 12 hours ago
Comment by bpavuk 7 hours ago
Comment by Muhammad523 12 hours ago
Comment by sinuhe69 1 day ago
Comment by Xirdus 1 day ago
WTF. Isn't the whole point of visual programming that you are NOT bound by the limitations of text as a medium? A block refers to a specific variable. It shouldn't matter what it's called, it shouldn't matter if what it's called changes, it should still refer to the same variable even after renames.
Comment by gs17 1 day ago
Now, custom blocks have a different issue, where deleting one just severs any code that was using it (so if you had some custom blocks in a program: [on start] -> a -> b -> c, deleting the definition for b will mean c no longer gets called). There's now a block to delete custom blocks, so you can make self-destructing code.
Comment by gs17 1 day ago
Comment by brian_harvey 15 hours ago
Also I made the mistake of writing the manual in MS Word. At the time, I couldn't find a standard way to insert pictures into a TeX document, or I would have used that. (Now, of course, there is a standard way.) There is an effort underway to convert the manual into a web-based format in a git repo that anyone can contribute to, but that effort is 90% done and you know what that means! :)
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
So it's getting better.
The other thing to remember is that the core Snap! development team is just two guys, Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig. When they're focused on things like trying to figure out how to get macros into Snap!, so that Snap! can truly be a Lisp (right now it's only most of a Lisp), they tend to leave the documentation effort to the community. If they had a larger team I might fault them for that, but with just two guys, I can't really blame them for focusing their efforts on things the community is less able to do, and leaving things the community can do up to the community.
Comment by brian_harvey 15 hours ago
Our team has officially grown to six people, adding Bernat Romagosa, Jadga Hügle, Michael Ball, and Joan i Pelegay. And several Snap! users have made major contributions, especially to libraries that extend the reach of the language. But the interpreter itself is still all Jens.
Comment by rmunn 14 hours ago
Comment by andrewla 1 day ago
A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely cannot learn software engineering from this.
Comment by lubujackson 1 day ago
The script is already flipping, with kids making software using AI but they can only fumble forward inch by inch while burning tokens. It would be great to introduce programming in the way it functions in the workplace - we want to make a Mario clone, start with the goal, hammer out the elements to a certain fidelity then let the AI cook.
Comment by diskzero 1 day ago
Comment by cycomachead 1 hour ago
That said, I think you can learn good fundamentals of SWE with tools like Snap!. You can still learn testing, design patterns, working with APIs, modularity etc.
No it’s not a distributed system, and perhaps the biggest pain point is collaboration is tricky. But still you can learn a ton of cool things without going that far into CS. :)
Comment by crushinator 1 day ago
Comment by alanbernstein 1 day ago
Comment by Benjamin_Dobell 15 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITWSL5lTLig
The video above shows keyboard, but the main motivation for the key-based navigation was actually gamepad.
Comment by gs17 1 day ago
Comment by JoeOfTexas 1 day ago
It did have a slight learning curve, but 5th graders were competing just fine against high schoolers haha.
Comment by jonplackett 1 day ago
Visual coding is a pain to change and move around quickly. It’s just clutter ultimately - if you know how to actually code.
Comment by poly2it 1 day ago
Comment by DrewADesign 23 hours ago
Though I doubt that happens much anymore.
Comment by lern_too_spel 1 day ago
Comment by lern_too_spel 17 hours ago
Comment by r_lee 1 day ago
it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world.
from the angle of someone trying to make some toy to teach programming, maybe in their head it's like: oh this is so simple and easy it should work perfectly for teaching
but from my experience, most of my learning came from "whats this?" "how do i make a thing like this?"
this doesn't provide a way to accomplish that or to promote curiosity
I think same applies to basic CS courses teaching bits and bytes, it's not really useful to know what bits and bytes are if you don't understand what they're even used for or why you should know what they are
however, this is just my subjective point of view, maybe it differs for others.
Comment by DonHopkins 1 day ago
But "no connection to the real world" is hard to sustain once you look at what people actually build with Snap!/Scratch. The ecosystem is full of bridges to physical stuff:
Cameras, microphones, audio, pen plotters, 3D (BeetleBlocks). Snap! 12.1 (video from a few days ago) adds body-language recognition, Bauhaus-style shape compositions, first-class Processes, translation updates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID7wYxzHUAc
Arduino / micro:bit / boards (Snap4Arduino, MicroBlocks, many hardware libraries):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltzlzk_zkys&list=PL5OeDsbY1E...
Robots (Finch, Hummingbird, Lego NXT, drones):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_0EqIbTlkk
Sewing machines (TurtleStitch -- embroidery from blocks; one of my favorites):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ra5ThxkrE
Web APIs and IoT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_P7MoBG250
ML/AI and digital fabrication (Ken Kahn's eCraft2Learn):
https://project.ecraft2learn.eu/
The "what's this? how do I make a thing like this?" curiosity you describe is exactly how a lot of people get pulled in -- making something move, blink, sing, or stitch on a machine they can see, rather than learning abstract syntax first. Blocks are the on-ramp; the project is the motivation.
Different audience than yours, maybe. But "just a toy walled off from reality" undersells what this community has been doing for decades.
Snap! also teaches real computer science at college level while staying accessible to kids -- not a stripped-down kiddie language. Brian Harvey: "Snap! is Scheme disguised as Scratch" (though he notes the original intent was closer to Logo disguised as Scratch):
https://forum.snap.berkeley.edu/t/hygienic-macros/3258/6
Re alanbernstein's point about keyboard vs GUI: Snap! is not keyboard-hostile. It has a keyboard editor for scripts -- build and edit whole scripts without the mouse, block search from the keyboard, infix arithmetic expressions typed left-to-right. Manual chapter:
https://docs.snap.berkeley.edu/user-interface-elements/#sec-...
Demo (typing formulas from the keyboard):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHAl3p3gEU
Full IDE accessibility (screen readers etc.) is still a work in progress; Jens and Brian document what's there now:
Comment by r_lee 21 hours ago
so it wasn't the project that was the motivation, it was figuring out how to do it for real, and getting closer to expertise in programming
for example the TurtleStitch, I don't know how to say this exactly, but to me it doesn't strike as something that'd interest people who want to get into programming, but is more like a way to showcase how to do machined embroidery in an accessible way
I might be totally wrong, but my problem seems to be that a lot of this is just about showing off the capabilities of Snap, but it's not really something I would've engaged with for example?
like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark?
like Snap doesn't really provide a way to understand how stuff is actually done except for maybe simple logic. So I don't see how it'd be very useful for e.g. learning CS when it's not really something you'd see in the real world, i.e. you're learning a learning platform and some basic concepts
I guess my point is like, if it's not really something that's used in the real world, unlike say JS or Python, why use it instead of getting up to speed in a real language?
again, it could be that I simply don't get it, or that I'm not the target audience, but I feel like there's a reason why these haven't really taken off, and IMO there's no reason why they would need to, because they serve a very specific niche
Comment by ModernMech 8 hours ago
The point of scratch is not to prepare students for the professional world of computing, nor is it to prepare students for study in a CS program.
Instead, it's to expose students to computational thinking at an early age in an accessible, age-appropriate way. It's the same reason we teach the Bohr model of the atom before exposing kids to orbitals and probability distributions -- the Bohr model is false but at least it can provide a model and scaffolding for future learning. They're not ready for real Python or Javascript yet. You as a child might have been, but scratch is for teaching all students, not just the ones with a preexisting aptitude for coding.
> if it's not really something that's used in the real world, unlike say JS or Python, why use it instead of getting up to speed in a real language?
Why do you feel like exposing young children to professional development tools is important? Have you ever tried to get a class of students up to speed in a real language? Give it a shot and it might answer a lot of your questions.
> it could be that I simply don't get it, or that I'm not the target audience
Yes, this is very likely. Few years back I did a survey of elementary school students and their opinions on programming. Young kids exposed to Scratch reported that programming was "fun", "exciting", "enjoyable" and "something they wanted to continue to do". They viewed it as an extension of art and play. On the other hand, older kids who were then exposed to Python and VS Code no longer reported feeling the same way about programming, instead using words like "frustrating", "hard", "confusing" and most damningly described it "like math class", the least popular subject among students.
Exposing kids to the frustrating and confusing path first is a good way to make sure no one wants to go into the field. You as a child would probably have pursued the field nonetheless, so I can see why Scratch doesn't seem like a good teaching tool to you.
> I feel like there's a reason why these haven't really taken off,
wdym Scratch is wildly popular with students and widely used throughout the world. You see people here in this thread stating it's what got them interested in programming. Something like Snap! is nice because it provides a higher ceiling for Scratch programmers. It's not as popular because it Scratch serves much of the role, but its existence is an important bridge for older students who will eventually transition to Python or Java.
For further reading that can explain the theory better than I can, see the writings of Alan Kay and Seymour Papert, especially Papert's book "Mindstorms".
Comment by DonHopkins 14 hours ago
No, I think you're the one missing the mark. And even if it shows off Snap! while teaching computer science, and students have something tangible, soft, and colorful to show off from the learning process, in what way is that missing the mark? What do you even believe the mark it misses is?
In no way are any of those modules I mentioned merely intended to simply show off Snap's capabilities. They have much more legitimate pedagogical purposes, and if you'd simply watch some of the Snap!Con presentations and videos I linked you to, you'd see and hear their developers and teachers and students show and explain what those purposes and results are.
I attended Snap!Con in Barcelona, played around with TurtleStitch myself, and still have and cherish the cool textile artifacts (and also cool friends) I made.
And the TurtleStitch presentation included live streaming video of students of diverse genders and cultures and ages enthusiastically showing off and talking about the beautiful physical objects they designed, programmed, made, presented to their parents and the conference, and are rightfully proud of, and discuss what they learned from the experience.
Trigger Warning: If diversity enrages you but Nazi salutes don't, then that's your own bigoted psychiatric problem.
Snap!Con 2021 - TurtleStitch: The Power of Diversity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-EGVQR9Aa4
> Over the last few years, the TS community has grown not only in size but also in diversity, integrating people from different cultures, ages and genders. We believe this has to do with the specific attraction that textiles generate. Every culture has a specific textile tradition which reaches directly into the daily lives of everyone, evocating both personal as well as collective memories, generating an affective field. The coding aspect allows rethinking this tradition from a contemporary point of view, creating a space that is open and not yet fully defined, inviting people to open experimental exploration.
> How this space is then explored, how the technical and the textile are combined, how machine and hand-craft are related and what kind of products -- tangible products of ones own learning and creativity -- are generated is deeply influenced by local conditions and personal preferences, providing the space of diverse articulation and, through the peer exchange on the platform, collaborative inspiration.
> In this talk, I will provide a short look back at the environment from which TurtleStitch emerged and give an overview of the current state. Voices from the TurtleStitch environment will provide their own perspectives on and use of TurtleStitch.
> Check out TurtleStitch at https://turtlestitch.org
In a nutshell or TL;DR for someone unwilling to put in the time and effort to learn or even consider evidence, and who talks about promoting curiosity but is incurious yourself, and who performatively refuses to recognize an obvious Nazi salute and feels compelled to repeatedly defend and praise Elon Musk after he does it twice in a row on international television: it's all about Constructionist Education, not promoting or showing off a product, or selling computer controlled embroidery machines, Arduinos, and robots, or even a cynical huckster perennially promising full self driving cars and trips to Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...
> Constructionist learning is a theory of learning centred on mental models. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use what they already know to acquire more knowledge.[1] Students learn through participation in project-based learning where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through coaching rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance.[1] Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.[2]
> Seymour Papert defined constructionism in a proposal to the National Science Foundation titled Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education as follows:
Papert> The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.[3]
And that's not bullshit, just a toy, or disconnected from the real world, as you so wrongly claim. You're the one who's making unsupportable statements that are provably disconnected from the real world, my friend. And yours are knowingly false whoppers intended to offend sincere educators and defend trolling fascists, not polite white lies to spare people's feelings.
Comment by rmunn 11 hours ago
Could we please try to follow the guidelines and not have flamewars and partisan dispute? Especially ones that seem to spring up out of nowhere, reviving conversations that are months old? I'm here to learn about cool new projects; if I want to read about politics or personal drama I have pretty much the entire rest of the Internet to do so.
Comment by DonHopkins 11 hours ago
His evidence-free Nazi-salute-defending arguments were in such bad faith, ignoring and refusing to address other people's valid counter arguments, the exact same way he is now ignoring and refusing to engage with mine, and sealioning questions whose very premises so wrong they don't deserve the answers I gave him anyway, that his old dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated, since they're a distraction from the useful things I actually linked to. The only thing his comments prove is that he's not arguing in good faith, and can only dispense drive-by evidence-free attacks.
You can easily find them yourself if you really don't believe me, but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?
I believe your time would be much better spent reading the links I already provided than his Musk cheerleading and oligarch water carrying and Nazi salute whitewashing. But if you really care about his arguments, why don't you ask him now to explain what he said about Musk, privately? Or doesn't he publish under his own name with his own email address so you can ask him, like I do?
I'm more than happy to answer your personal email about my own arguments and projects, and continue this discussion in private: don@donhopkins.com
His own ungrounded vitriolic words attacking Jens Mönig's and Brian Harvey's and Seymour Papert's life work like "it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world" and "like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark" are dismissive, insulting, and provably wrong.
So I posted several links and evidence refuting him and defending my friends. Yet then he repeated the same pattern as his full throated defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, by ignoring all the evidence, and reiterating his unsubstantiated false accusations, without providing any objective evidence or coherent arguments or even any citations himself.
If you'd like to learn about cool free open source educational projects, please look at the many links I already posted, and what I posted to the Logo discussion. At least spend as much time on those interesting relevent links as you already have wasted reading his uninteresing irrelevent posting history, please.
He didn't post any links or evidence or even coherent arguments to support his mistaken and aggressive accusations, while I refuted "this is BS" by linking to and quoting the Wikipedia page about Seymour Papert's Constructionist Education philosophy, "just a toy" by naming and linking to many Snap! projects and demos, and "no connection to the real world" by citing several physical real world connections like TurtleStitch.
Yet he dismissed and ignored all of that, and questioned the motives of sincere professional educators and developers of free open source software as merely and illegitimately promoting Snap!, because he isn't arguing in good faith, just attacking, and he didn't bother looking at any of the links, so he still doesn't know what he's talking about.
If reading his oligarch-syncophantic posting history (which I was trying to save you from by identifying where he's actually coming from) isn't interesting enough for you, and you still thirst to learn about cool projects, then please look at the links I already posted, read my other recent posts about Logo, and check out some of the other educational projects I've been developing over several decades, which were deeply inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionism, that I've written a lot about.
But if like him you're so offput and triggered by the very mention of diversity, constructionist education, free speech for anyone but Musk, and criticism of an unloving parent so terrible and unaccepting that he publically and vitriolically disparages, abuses, and disowns his own trans daughter in front of millions of people that you have to leap to his defense, then there's nothing I can do for you, sir.
But I certainly hope you're not like that, so here are some links in good faith:
Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
This is Micropolis (open source SimCity) in WebAssembly:
This is The Sims 1 character animation system (which I original wrote in C++ 30 years ago) rewritten in TypeScript and WebGL:
Micropolis and other open source code, documentation, and designs for new educational software:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/
MOOLLM Constructionism skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/constru...
MOOLLM Adventure skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...
Adventure Compiler:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...
Gary Drescher's Schema Mechanism skill from "Made Up Minds" (based on his PhD thesis and book about how children learn, with his advisor Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab):
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/schema-...
MOOLLM Play Learn Lift skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/play-le...
Comment by rmunn 10 hours ago
Comment by r_lee 9 hours ago
Here's my reply with links to my past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671123
I understand that some consider Elon a Nazi but I don't consider that a common belief, so I don't know why I'd need to support that belief in order to talk about this Snap language and others, like Scratch.
Comment by DonHopkins 2 hours ago
So did you look at any of the links and videos I posted? Your reply totally ignored them, so I will give you another chance. Go read them, and then tell me what they said, and explain how can you continue to stand behind the false accusations you made about my friends and their motives, without acknowleding that your facts and opinions are provably mistaken.
Do you still continue to claim that a Snap is bullshit, that it's a toy, and that it's not connected to the real world?
You're the one who threw the first stone calling it "BS", with no evidence to back that up, and you certainly haven't said anything to support that, and it certainly isn't "BS" or a "toy" just because you say so but can't back up your insulting ignorant accusations.
I already showed you many ways Snap! connectes to the real world, and you are still denying all that. Are you calling me a liar, or do you just have no reading comprehension whatsoever? Do you not think robots, Arduinos, network programming, AI programming, computer science, algorithms, closures, continuations, functional programming, and meta programming are not the "real world"?
In case you didn't know, those are all things you can do with Snap!, and you can't deny you know because I already told you and gave youy links to prove it. You just ignored them, and kept claiming what they proved wrong.
Have you even looked at the college level computer science curriculum Brian Harvey wrote called "The Beauty and Joy of Computing"? I highly doubt it, because the false claims you are making about Snap! fly in the face of everything in that book. It proves you wrong. So what is your definition of the "real world", if not all that I cited and the book teaches?
Then how do you reconcile your denial of reality with all the proof that you're wrong that I posted? I don't expect you to be able to, because, as I said, you're not arguing in good faith, so it's not worth engaging with you. You don't bother reading anything other people post, or replying to what other people say, so reading what you write is a complete waste of time.
If you are capable of arguing in good faith, then tell me if you would treat your own children the way Elon Musk treats his own trans daughter? Do you believe he's a good father, or a transphobic bigot? And if you really don't believe he was making a Nazi salute, then record a video of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did, post it to youtube under your real name, and then post a link to it. Or is there some reason you don't want to do that, huh?
Comment by r_lee 2 hours ago
I've already made my points very clear about this, sure, you can do that, but how many are actually doing AI programming in Snap? Why would you? It's very niche and real software doesn't get made in Scratch or Snap. I would say the same thing about Arduino and other things. Again, my opinion, beware.
Again, I don't even know you, I don't know about your friends, I never threw any "stones" here on purpose. I don't expect someone to get so hurt over me criticizing a Scratch-like programming language when posting on HN. Should I expect the same for calling Scratch a toy language?
> If you are capable of arguing in good faith, then tell me if you would treat your own children the way Elon Musk treats his own trans daughter? Do you believe he's a good father, or a transphobic bigot? And if you really don't believe he was making a Nazi salute, then record a video of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did, post it to youtube under your real name, and then post a link to it. Or is there some reason you don't want to do that, huh?
So everyone who thinks Elon did not do a heil hiler salute to show off how big of a Nazi he is, is now forced to do this because Don Hopkins said so? aye aye sir!
"Or is there some reason you don't want to do that, huh?" is absolutely ridiculous.
You need to self-reflect.
Comment by DonHopkins 1 hour ago
Remember, I am still waiting for your definition of what "_real_ programming" is, that classifies Scheme as a real programming language, but not Snap!.
Again you're proving that you didn't read or understand a thing I wrote. I already gave you links to Ken Kahn's ecraft2learn project, but obviously you didn't look at it. Since you refuse to look at or acknowledge anything I link to, I will walk you through some of it here.
Ken arrived at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s, where Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert served on his PhD committee. His thesis Creation of computer animation from story descriptions was a very early example of generative AI.
During the 1970s (specifically between 1973 and 1979), Ken taught artificial intelligence to elementary school children as a graduate researcher in the MIT AI Laboratory's Logo Group.
He developed a distributed concurrent constraint visual programming language called Pictorial Janus in 1990-1991.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(concurrent_constraint_p...
From 1995-present, he developed a visual programming language called ToonTalk, that looks and feels like a video game, for teaching programming and high level CS concepts like concurrency and message passing to kids.
https://toontalk.com/English/kenkahn.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToonTalk
53 years after he started teaching Logo to kids with Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab Logo Group, he's still teaching AI programming to kids, now with Snap! and his etoys2learn project. Here are his 172 citations on google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9hQiyqcAAAAJ&hl=en
Here's Jens Mönig demonstrating the data extensions to Snap! that enable programming neural nets in pure Snap! block code. No JavaScript. No WASM. No WebGPU or WebGL. Pure Snap! blocks. Again disproving your stubborn offensive delusions that Snap! is bullshit, a toy, has no connection to the real world, and is not useful for teaching AI or advanced computer science concepts. Not having any idea what you're talking about and refusing to look at evidence does not prove your unfounded opinions are right.
What's new in Snap! 11 - Data - Extensions - Neural Networks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk
My closing keynote address at SnapCon25 in Heidelberg, introducing deep machine learning capabilities to Snap as an alternative way to create custom predicate blocks.
The projects created "live" during this talk can be found here:
Backpropagation ANN Sprite Layers:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Instruments Recognition:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Gesture Recognition:
https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/snap.html#present:Username=je...
Transcript excerpts about how Snap! teaches AI programming and CS concepts to kids:
NOT A TOY: IT TEACHES THE HIGH-LEVEL IDEAS
Abstraction has nothing to do with technology -- it is philosophy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=554s
> This is not about ones and zeros. This is not about how a processor works. This is not about how technology works. This has nothing to do with technology. This is all about philosophy. This is all about how we humans think about things.
If you think teaching merge sort is teaching algorithms, you are not doing your job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4518s
> If you're teaching merge sort and you think you're teaching algorithms, that's fine for teaching an algorithm, but you're not doing your job.
Hyperblocks: if it takes one number, it takes any dimension of numbers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=319s
> The cool thing about Snap! that we've told you all along, and that's been a theme of this conference, is that if it takes one number, it takes one number in any dimension, or it takes any dimension of numbers.
REAL NEURAL NETWORKS, IMPLEMENTED IN SNAP! ITSELF
There is no secret JavaScript block
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3757s
> These neural networks are all implemented in Snap! itself. There is no secret JavaScript block in there. It's all implemented using this new object-oriented system that we have in there, where we just have prototypical inheritance with actual objects with a new request block.
The Nobel Prize in Physics, in one line of blocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2097s
> This thing here is the current Nobel Prize of Physics. And I've seen more complicated code than that.
Asked on stage whether that script is the whole perceptron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4672s
> "Is that all there is to a perceptron?" -- "Yes." -- "So there's not any hidden magic?" -- "Nope. This is why we wanted to have it out in the open. There's no -- this is it."
KIDS CAN ACTUALLY DO THIS
A perceptron is simpler than the projects the kids in your classes already write
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=1234s
> This is a perceptron and this is a layer in a neural network. You've all written more complicated stuff than this, and the kids in your classes have written more complicated projects than this.
Using neural nets in Snap! is high school work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4490s
> I would expect that just using these neural nets to be something that you could probably do in high school.
Not teaching backpropagation in college is killing computer science
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=4502s
> Honestly, I think if you're not teaching backpropagation in college, you're killing computer science. This is the most relevant algorithm around.
CONNECTED TO THE REAL WORLD
Training a net live, on stage, on his own harmonica and recorder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2460s
> It'd be way cooler if we could use our own data. So let me use my own data.
Same algorithm: one instrument from another, one drawing from another, a sea mine from a rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3723s
> It's the same neural network, the same algorithm, that can distinguish one instrument from another, one drawing from another, a sea mine from a rock. It's the same thing, folks.
Snap! 11 talks to Arduinos and speaks websockets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3800s
> You've seen [Jan?] show that now we can connect to Arduinos in Snap! 11, because he has ported Snap4Arduino -- he called it the S4A bridge, which is the most enormous understatement there is. Bernat has contributed websockets, which is immensely useful.
AND NOT ONE INCH OF AI HYPE
Anyone selling you "explainable AI" is lying to you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=2272s
> If any company, if any mogul is telling you that they're working on explainable AI, they are lying to you. They're working on some chatbot that is going to come up with some gibberish that is going to be an explanation, but it's not going to be what's actually going on. There is no way to explain what's going on as soon as you have one hidden layer.
Would you take a life and death decision on an 80 percent chance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=1897s
> Think about 80%. This is a decision, friend or foe. Are you going to kill somebody with an 80% chance? Probably not. Are you going to take life and death decisions on an 80% chance? Probably not.
This might be the last algorithm we get to teach, so we had better teach it well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9W04TEMBUk&t=3739s
> This thing is eating up our lunch. We want to teach algorithms. This might be the last algorithm we get to teach. We better teach it well.
Comment by DonHopkins 9 hours ago
Comment by r_lee 9 hours ago
I replied to this comment:
> I don't love graphical programming environments like this and Scratch and I can't quite put my finger on why I find them so unattractive. > A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely cannot learn software engineering from this.
And you then showed off some embroidery stuff and things that I explained that in my own opinion, are not connected to real world software engineering/programming, and seem to serve Snap rather than things that you'd actually use in the field.
That's my opinion and I'm allowed to have my own. Otherwise all I could say is that you're right and its awesome. Right?
And here you are attacking me with things like:
"but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?"
"dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated"
Because apparently I'm not allowed to have my own opinions of blocky visual programming languages. A bit fascist isn't it?
Anyhow
"I attended Snap!Con in Barcelona, played around with TurtleStitch myself, and still have and cherish the cool textile artifacts (and also cool friends) I made.
And the TurtleStitch presentation included live streaming video of students of diverse genders and cultures and ages enthusiastically showing off and talking about the beautiful physical objects they designed, programmed, made, presented to their parents and the conference, and are rightfully proud of, and discuss what they learned from the experience."
Okay, how does this disprove my point that its more about making machined embroidery accessible vs. learning CS concepts?
And who would attend Snap!Con unless they were part of that community working on the ecosystem or deeply involved with it?
You're projecting that I'm arguing in bad faith, but clearly that's you here, I can't really engage with you properly when your replies are full of things like:
" In a nutshell or TL;DR for someone unwilling to put in the time and effort to learn or even consider evidence, and who talks about promoting curiosity but is incurious yourself, and who performatively refuses to recognize an obvious Nazi salute and feels compelled to repeatedly defend and praise Elon Musk after he does it twice in a row on international television: it's all about Constructionist Education, not promoting or showing off a product, or selling computer controlled embroidery machines, Arduinos, and robots, or even a cynical huckster perennially promising full self driving cars and trips to Mars."
I visited all the links you provided and still arrived in the same conclusion.
and you're saying I'm incurious. Can you just stop lying and spreading lies about me? And when have I praised Musk?
If you're so emotionally attached to this 'language' that you feel the need to dig up "dirt" on me from my post history and spread lies and tell others that I'm some kind of fascist, maybe you should reevaluate your life choices. I wouldn't get this mad over someone criticizing Go or Rust etc.
And it proves that you're unable to take criticism of your language since you're convinced that no matter what, you're right and that with you posting some conference talk links, others should become convinced that it's a super relevant language.
And with regards to Constructionism, from my understanding, the main point seems to be to use existing knowledge to acquire more knowledge, CS/programming in this case.
From the Wikipedia page:
"The following five strategies make problem-based learning more effective:
1. The learning activities should be related to a larger task. The larger task is important because it allows students to see that the activities can be applied to many aspects of life and, as a result, students are more likely to find the activities they are doing useful."
This is exactly my criticism. With Snap / etc. the larger task is just a demo or something inside Snap. maybe controlling some robot, okay.
But it's not something you'd see in the real world, it can't be "applied to many aspects of life" in the context of CS, it's mostly constrained to Snap and its environment.
My belief is that learning is done best when there is a connection to something real, not just a simulation or an exercise. With Snap, it inevitably is kind of just a demo. Whereas with real languages you can get close to how things are done for real, which serve as a motivator and invoke curiosity.
Again, if it's your opinion that Snap is successful and that's why people are using it to learn to code, then that's fine. I haven't seen that happen yet and I believe there are reasons as to why I haven't seen that happen.
And since I'm here in good faith (unlike you) I will provide links to my Nazi comments as per your accusations:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589879 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590610 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589966
btw, I have literally criticized the wealth of Musk in HN before and how it's unsustainable, same with the AI datacenter buildout and financial consolidation that's happening right now.
Considering your vast experience and knowledge, I find your conduct pretty embarrassing here.
Comment by ModernMech 7 hours ago
Okay but you're stacking your unsubstantiated belief based on a sample of just you against an entire field of research where people have dedicated their lives, so maybe you can understand why some people take it personally when you just call it BS off the cuff?
> since you're convinced that no matter what, you're right
You're the one convinced you're right no matter what. You countered their very many resources with "Yeah but my belief". Okay, well what backs up your belief? Again, Scratch/Snap are backed up by decades of research, user studies, and deployments. It's not this one person's opinion what they're saying here.
> Whereas with real languages you can get close to how things are done for real, which serve as a motivator and invoke curiosity.
Have you actually examined if this is true or do you just feel that it is true? Moreover, even if it is true, have you examined if this is the only and best way to do things for everyone or do you just feel it?
Comment by r_lee 6 hours ago
No, I usually don't understand why people take it personally if it's not directed towards anyone, but I do understand why it would come off as demeaning, so for that I apologize.
However it was not to the degree where this guy's response was warranted at all. Not one bit.
> You're the one convinced you're right no matter what. No. I never said I was right. I've literally multiple times said that it is MY opinion, and my view point, and that I'm simply saying what I think.
Okay, decades of research and whatnot, so is the conclusion that Snap is perfect for what it's intended and that there is no room for criticism or opposing views against it? Would I have to do decades of research in order to say anything about Snap? That would basically mean it's immune from criticism. We can say the same things about SAP for example.
again, I was replying to this comment:
> I don't love graphical programming environments like this and Scratch and I can't quite put my finger on why I find them so unattractive. > A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely *cannot learn software engineering* from this.
I am not saying that it doesn't fill a niche, it's literally what I've already said, but I said that it doesn't mean that it is widely applicable, which is *totally fine*
> Have you actually examined if this is true or do you just feel that it is true? Yes, my experience was this. I never said it was for everyone, and you obviously know that, there's no way something will work for absolutely everyone
and I also haven't met basically anyone who learnt programming with Scratch or etc., it was mostly though playing around with real stuff in primitive ways and learning how things work until they became familiar.
I don't understand. There are a few people here who said they learnt programming through scratch, and that's great. However, I'm giving my own subjective experience and my thoughts as to why imo this is not as effective as some might claim, and especially for actually learning programming, not just gaining interest (which would be a small niche)
I think it's totally fine to give your own views, opinions and beliefs on a HN post subject, and I believe that progress happens through people communicating their own ideas and beliefs about things, from which others can then gain new perspectives outside of their own.
I also think it's very much against the hacker spirit to simply shut down everything because there isn't decades of research behind an argument.
You can discard all my beliefs and arguments here and that's totally fine. If they spark some idea or some theory, that's even better. Or if it's something you can relate to and go "oh so it's not just me!" that's also cool. Like how I felt with the original reply.
Comment by ModernMech 4 hours ago
Agreed.
> so is the conclusion that Snap is perfect for what it's intended and that there is no room for criticism or opposing views against it?
That's going too far in the opposite direction, no one has claimed that at all. Your opening post was "this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world."
That was a strong negative statement so you've elicited strong pushback.
> and I also haven't met basically anyone who learnt programming with Scratch or etc.,
Well what kind of people do you associate with? What age group? I'm 40, people my age learned Logo as kids, which was the first language of its kind but also quite old by the 90s when I learned it. Before Logo, no one really made languages for kids.
The last student I taught who reported having learned from Logo was in 2020 and he was from Greece, so I think it may have some special appeal there. Beyond that, most of my students (I have taught thousands) report having their first programming experience in Scratch, regardless of whether they are majoring in CS or not. I can count on one hand the number of students who started learning naturally via Python or Javascript or even HTML before being introduced by a teacher to Scratch.
> I think it's totally fine to give your own views
It's totally fine to give your own views and you've spent many posts and many characters doing just that, so you haven't been impeded.
What I and others have are asking is for you to consider something beyond your own views. You've already acknowledged that probably you're not the target audience here, and it's exactly that: Scratch is not for you, and that's okay. That doesn't mean your way doesn't work when it works, but if you want to say something more about how far your method goes or Scratch's efficacy, you need something more than your own views.
Look, I'm actually with you -- I started programming on a mechanical typewriter at 5, and kept going from there. I love running enrichment programs for kids who are like that because you can give them anything and they'll just go with it. But really, only <1% of kids are like that.
Comment by r_lee 2 hours ago
Yes, the phrasing I used was simply to point out that without the possibility of giving my beliefs and thoughts, we'd end up in this loop where you could only chime in if you can back your arguments with all kinds of research and citations, which usually ends up shutting the conversation down entirely, because the people involved in such projects can do so but most can't.
Strong pushback is completely fine and I appreciate it. It's kind of what I try to aim for, because it allows us to get down to the truth, or something of value.
> Well what kind of people do you associate with? What age group? I'm 40, people my age learned Logo as kids, which was the first language of its kind but also quite old by the 90s when I learned it. Before Logo, no one really made languages for kids.
I started programming at around 12, and many people that I know are in their 20-30s or so. I don't have experience with Logo or have heard of anyone in my circles using it.
Many of my friends began by tinkering with games, writing scripts for them or just writing basic scripts in Bash/Batch/JS/Python and moving to C#/C++ etc.
And I don't think Scratch is completely irrelevant, I just simply think that it is a very limited tool, it's got very few use cases, and that you're better off moving off of it sooner than later, rather than trying to use it for more complex projects or exercises.
> What I and others have are asking is for you to consider something beyond your own views.
And I appreciate that, but I don't think this was simply the case (not talking about you)
for example my reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666774 , I was very upfront with what motivated me and what angle I was coming from, and Don seemed to reply to me trying to convince me that I was mistaken and that in fact it was very relevant and that it "teaches real CS at college level"
I then replied in the aforementioned post that I still didn't get it, and what my motivations were when getting into programming and why the examples he gave didn't change my opinions and why I felt like that.
You replied there with "nor is it to prepare students for study in a CS program." but that was part of my criticism because he claimed that.
Scratch/Snap is fine for what it is, as a way to get young kids interested in the simple primitives of programming and logic. That's great! But again, I think there's a reason why some people, including I, don't see the appeal of these for actual "programming", which is what he tried to show me it's useful for.
That's what I meant with "toy". It's not _really_ programming, and it's very niche, which you seem to point out with how young kids viewed it as an "extension of art and play"
And I absolutely agree, don't put a 5 year old on a bash terminal or an IDE, but I'm not talking about that here. Don was giving out links on Arduinos, Web APIs/IoT, ML/AI, sensors, etc. that's what I meant with "missing the mark"
But I know that even in e.g. where I live, if you join an after-school computer club or whatever, they will happily let you do simple Java courses (MOOCs), or at least they used to do so, even at like 6th grade.
> Look, I'm actually with you -- I started programming on a mechanical typewriter at 5, and kept going from there. I love running enrichment programs for kids who are like that because you can give them anything and they'll just go with it. But really, only <1% of kids are like that.
Yes, that's why I'm aware that I may be missing something here, but I don't think even what you're pointing out here contradicts my core points, unlike with what Don tried to convey in his initial reply.
And the reason why I've kept engaging is because I thought that my point of view may be unique and maybe there could be something there which would explain why these kinds of "languages" don't work for specific situations or audiences. If it was just about it being a language for young kids to explore basic programming logic, I wouldn't have argued against it at all.
Comment by DonHopkins 2 hours ago
You're dead wrong. Prove it. Explain what you mean. Give us your definition of what _really_ programming is, and prove that Scheme, Python, and JavaScript are _really_ programming by that definition, but Snap! isn't.
So is Scheme "_really_ programming" or not? What exactly is Snap! missing that Scheme has, that disqualifies it from being "_really_ programming"? If as I predict you dodge this question, that proves my point.
>lern_too_spel 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]
>This supports making your own higher order functions. You absolutely can learn software engineering from this. What you can't do is get syntax errors, which makes teaching a classroom of kids by yourself intractable.
>lern_too_spel 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–]
>I skimmed the manual. It's more powerful than I thought. You can do metaprogramming directly in the language, which will deconstruct blocks into lists. It's basically Scheme as blocks,
And while you're at it, post that video of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did that so many people are calling a Nazi salute, under your own real name, to prove it's not. You seem so confident you're right, you should have no problem doing that either. If you refuse, you've just proven my point again that you're not arguing in good faith, and that you're a coward who is afraid to stand by your own words and real name and perform what is obviously a Nazi salute. Because you know you're wrong.
Comment by r_lee 2 hours ago
Nobody is using Snap in production or writing real applications with it. The same can't be said for Python or JS. When you're writing Python or JS, you are truly writing code.
I would say Scheme is programming because it's literally a Lisp dialect, and Lisp is still used so.. yeah.
With Snap/Scratch, you're playing around with Snap/Scratch. Do you understand my point here?
By the time you'd reach for the complex functions of Snap, you're better off just learning actual languages, do you get what I mean? Unless you just want to make stuff happen fast.
I would disagree with the guy saying you can "learn software engineering from this". No you can't and you really shouldn't try to.
Otherwise we can go and argue that Factorio blocks or Minecraft redstone is programming because you can make a CPU in them.
> And while you're at it, post that video of yourself doing the exact same thing Musk did that so many people are calling a Nazi salute, under your own real name, to prove it's not. You seem so confident you're right, you should have no problem doing that either. If you refuse, you've just proven my point again that you're not arguing in good faith, and that you're a coward who is afraid to stand by your own words and real name and perform what is obviously a Nazi salute. Because you know you're wrong.
Again reminding you to self-reflect because this is unhinged. What is wrong with you?
Comment by ModernMech 8 hours ago
"This is python, we use it to do professional development work. Here's VS code, we use it to do professional development work. Let's learn them."
6 year olds: "Okay!"
Proceeds to mangle whitespace, variable names, scope, indexing, ==, forgets :, doesn't understand what def is, even after they get all that the program is basically "hello world" print to console.
6 year olds: "Programming is hard and frustrating with little payoff, I don't want to do this anymore"
The one 6 year who who will grow up to be a greybeard sysadmin "This stuff is great! I can't wait to learn more!"
Teachers: "I have no idea what I'm doing, the devs keep saying how Python is supposed to be easy and it's built for learning, but I'm just as confused as the kids."
--
Here's how teaching kids goes with scratch:
"This is scratch, you snape these colored shapes together and they do things like make this character move"
6 year olds: "Okay!"
Proceeds to make games and stories with graphics, sounds and interaction, which they share with their friends, fully editable and runnable in a web environment with zero setup: https://scratch.mit.edu
6 year olds: "Wow programming is fun! I can't wait to learn more!"
The one 6 year who who will grow up to be a greybeard sysadmin "I agree this stuff is great! I can't wait to learn more!"
Teachers: "It wasn't hard to get up and running with scratch, it's very easy to teach and I get it."
Comment by Dwedit 1 day ago
Comment by Jtsummers 1 day ago
Fortunately the name is Snap! so typing it isn't much of a problem. (With the !, which was stripped from the submission title and when most people write about it.)
Comment by gs17 1 day ago
Edit: Oh, you meant the lambda in the post title? It's not really part of the name, but you can at least type it into Snap itself.
Comment by brian_harvey 15 hours ago
Comment by brian_harvey 14 hours ago
Right, you aren't our target audience. We're after the people who aren't going to major in computer science in college, but who're curious what all the fuss is about. They've taken high school algebra, so they know what a variable is and what a function is. (They don't have to know about functions as data, but we hope to teach them that.) These days, they probably used Scratch in elementary school, so we don't have to teach them the syntax of blocks, or what a sprite is, etc.
Nobody's going to come straight out of our class into a software engineering job. They'll have plenty of opportunity to learn that later, supposing that (as happens gratifyingly often) they change their minds about what to study in college because of our course.
They're not (or at least not yet) hackers, in the sense of people whose instinct on meeting a machine is to take it apart.
Oh, P.S., there is one sense in which block languages are better for software engineering: you can have arbitrarily long names of things (including spaces between words), because you only ever need to type the name once, so you can give your procedures self-documenting names such as "convert upper case to lower case letters" instead of ugly "convUcLc".
Comment by rmunn 14 hours ago
But you know some wag is going to paste the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace into a block name, just to see if he can. :-) So perhaps there does need to be an artificial limit, at 4096 characters or so, on block names.
Comment by dr_kiszonka 11 hours ago
Comment by pamelafox 13 hours ago
While there, I helped develop this middle school curriculum for Snap: https://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/course/sparks.html
It was really interesting to attempt a functions-first approach that was still fun - I ended up re-making similar projects for a functions-first Python course as well.
Comment by stymaar 1 day ago
> About Snap!
> Snap! (formerly BYOB) is a visual, drag-and-drop programming language. It is an extended reimplementation of Scratch (a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab) that allows you to Build Your Own Blocks. It also features first class[1] lists, first class procedures, and first class continuations[2]. These added capabilities make it suitable for a serious introduction to computer science for high school or college students.
Comment by biofox 1 day ago
Comment by striking 1 day ago
Comment by DonHopkins 1 day ago
Jens Mönig was on the Scratch Team (invited by Mitch Resnick). BYOB was presented at Scratch@MIT 2010 explicitly to merge ideas back into Scratch, not to fork the community:
https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/resources/announcing-byob2...
Berkeley has kept showing up at Scratch conferences (Amsterdam 2015, Bordeaux 2017), and the Scratch forums hosted BYOB/Snap! discussion for years:
https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/4455/
So "NIH syndrome," "reinventing the wheel," and "fragmenting the community" is pretty much the opposite of how these two actually interact.
Documented cross-pollination:
BYOB => Scratch: custom blocks (Scratch 2.0 took command blocks only, not reporters/lambda). That was an explicit goal:
https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Snap!
Scratch => Snap!: browser rewrite timing influenced by Scratch 2.0 plans; Morphic via John Maloney; CC-licensed costumes/sounds used under license.
Shared people: Jens (Scratch Team => Snap! lead), John Maloney (Scratch/Morphic; GP session with Jens at Scratch2015AMS), Bernat Romagosa (Snap!, MicroBlocks, Snap4Arduino -- Bordeaux, Snap!Cons).
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
And so I taught my class using Snap!, because it has:
- Lists that are proper first-class types, and can contain anything, including other lists, and also blocks
- Blocks (functions) that are also proper first-class types, and can take anything as parameters, including lists and blocks.
- Blocks that can create and return other blocks, thereby enabling functional programming
- All the standard list-handling primitives you would expect, like `filter` and `map`
All of which was missing from Scratch when I looked at it six months ago.
Scratch is a toy language, with a deliberate ceiling that you can't get past because of the language's design. Snap! is a real programming language with no ceiling, with the visual appearance of a toy. It takes longer to do anything in Snap! than in a professional language like Lisp or C# or Go or ... well, all of them, because dragging blocks together is a lot slower than typing. But you can do anything you need to in Snap!. There is no artificial limit that blocks you from going farther, the way Scratch has.
P.S. Saying that Scratch is artificially limited is not meant as a dig against the language. It's a deliberate design choice, and it's a fine choice if your intent is to teach people the very basics and then graduate them to another language. It's a choice I disagree with, because I prefer the way Snap! has implemented the same pedagogical choice (you can create tutorials with a limited set of blocks, to avoid presenting complete beginners with an overwhelming array of choices). But it's a defensible choice in many cases (many kids taking a programming class will not have the aptitude — and those who do turn out to have the knack for it can be graduated to Snap! really easily and not have to relearn everything).
Comment by brian_harvey 16 hours ago
Thanks!
Comment by rmunn 14 hours ago
And thank you for all your work not just on Snap!, but on Logo before that. You have done a lot for coding education.
Comment by jc4p 1 day ago
They also attend local classes and their teachers switched from Snap to this which is way simpler and stickier with my nephews: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode
Comment by crushinator 1 day ago
A couple years ago I went through Flexbox Froggy with him out of curiosity, and the really interesting thing was that he was able to complete all the levels but only by dictating to me what to write, because his eye hand coordination wasn't yet up to the task of typing. He has a laptop now and he's getting better but his fingers just don't work very quickly and accurately yet. It's such an interesting thing developmentally that the visual coding approach is helpful for.
Comment by dr_kiszonka 1 day ago
Comment by crushinator 1 day ago
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Comment by crushinator 23 hours ago
But it's different for every kid! He was a very early reader and he's autistic, one of the markers of his presentation of which is being ahead of some developmental benchmarks and behind on others. If you have the resources, those kids coding clubs are all over these days and they do a great job of making it a fun, social activity for a certain type of dorky kid.
Comment by Muhammad523 11 hours ago
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Comment by anguishe 1 day ago
I'll have to add it to my list to go and check out any new updates/features they have.
I can NOT wait to get my little one into something like this!
Comment by smlacy 1 day ago
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
Comment by avadodin 19 hours ago
Sure, you could use a Scratch for loop and be done with your cat piano program but have you considered constructing something that theoretically works like a for loop from obscure calculus?
We even have the occult symbol!
Joking aside, if base Scratch does lack a way to express trees as claimed Snap! may in fact be better from the perspective of teaching computer science concepts.
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
Comment by jacknews 20 hours ago
It's clearly designed for older students, but at that point some of the advantages of blocks are lost.
Most of these systems suffer from the 'canvas' model, where you have many stacks of blocks scattered around the canvas as they are created, possibly in no particular or logical order. It's difficult to find things or to get a good overview, and really becomes a navigation problem as projects get bigger. I think they would greatly benefit from a more traditional ide/file type structure, or some other way to structure 'stacks'.
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
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Comment by chrisjj 1 day ago
My first attempt to place a statement (play sound at Hz) failed with a Type Error.
Android Chrome.
Comment by gs17 1 day ago
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Comment by DonHopkins 1 day ago
[...] I'm also a huge fan of Snap!, which has all the advantages of Logo (Lisp without parenthesis) and Scratch / eToys / Squeak / App Inventor family of block based visual programming languages, but all the power of Scheme.
If you know Scheme, then it's easy to think about Snap!: it's just Scheme with a visual block syntax, but with some functions renamed to make them easier to learn, plus all the stage and turtle graphics stuff from Scratch, running in a web browser!
I didn't realize until watching in amazement as Jens Mönig used his own creation, that it also has full keyboard support, so you can create and edit programs without using the mouse!
It's much easier to teach Scheme to kids by teaching them Snap!, because the user interface is so much better than a text editor.
I attended Snap!Con2023 in Barcelona recently, and we discussed some interesting possible extensions to Snap:
Grammar defining blocks. Right now you can create your own custom vocabularies of blocks that fit together in particular constrained ways, by writing JavaScript Snap! extensions. Develop a set of blocks for visually defining new grammars and vocabularies of custom parameterizable blocks.
For example, a grammar for representing plants with seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flowers, petals, etc. You can assemble and edit them manually by dragging and dropping from a palette, or write programs that generated and interpret and transform them, and pass them around as data, for example as instructions to the embroidery machine to sew, or logo turtle to draw.
Turtlestitch - Coded Embroidery:
https://www.turtlestitch.org/page/about
Ken Kahn led a discussion about integrating LLMs like ChatGPT with Snap!. He's the developer of eCraft2Learn for teaching kids AI programming. Ken recently made some cool Snap! extensions for integrating LLMs with the speech synthesis and recognition system, and orchestrating conversations between different characters.
Snap!Con2023: Creative uses of Snap! blocks using large language models like GPT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2rNGsbzkXI
Enabling children and beginning programmers to build AI programs:
https://ecraft2learn.github.io/ai/
But when it comes to LLMs, code generation, and code understanding, JavaScript has two huge insurmountable advantages over Snap! or any other block based visual programming languages:
1) First of all it's extremely well known, by both humans and LLMs.
2) And second of all, there's typically no efficient and faithful way to textually represent block based programs in a way that ChatGPT (or humans) can easily understand and generate.
Of course you could just dump out the XML or JSON save file, but that wastes your token budget, and doesn't work well, because the LLM doesn't inherently understand the syntax and semantics of save files the way it deeply groks JavaScript.
You need to define some equivalent text based language to serialize and deserialize your visual programs, or define some equivalency to an existing language, so you can translate back and forth without loss.
Like Relax/NG has an XML syntax and also a simple concise human readable syntax, both which can express the same things.
But no matter what equivalent language you come up with to serialize your block programs into, it'll never be as well known as JavaScript (unless it IS JavaScript).
I think Snap! could take advantage of its equivalency with Scheme, and you could just parse Scheme into Snap! blocks, and the other way around. And ChatGPT knows scheme pretty well, though it's not as ubiquitous and standard as JavaScript.
Logo would not be as good as Scheme, since it has ambiguities, because you need to know the number of parameters a function uses in order to parse it, since it's essentially Lisp without parens. [...]
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
There's already a right-click menu option called "Lisp code". Take the "turn left 15 degrees" block (the "15" is the default value but of course it's a parameter that can be set to anything), drag it out into the editor, and right-click the block. Choose "Lisp code" and `(left 15)` will be displayed in a results bubble; you can then right-click the results bubble and export it to a file or copy it to the clipboard. If you have two blocks put together then the resulting Lisp code looks like this:
(
(left 15)
(move 10)
)
Comment by cycomachead 1 hour ago
Whether using text with LLMs in Snap! is actually a good idea is up for debate, but it is doable.
Comment by gs17 15 hours ago
Once you have the text version, you put it back into a split block set to split "by blocks", which gets the list version, which can then be put into the input list of a join block to get the code again.
This is technically discoverable from within Snap itself since they provide a library wrapping these steps, but it's not the first place you might look if you don't know it already exists.
Comment by fnord77 15 hours ago
Comment by k2xl 1 day ago
Comment by utopiah 1 day ago
Most of them will never become professional actors, authors, mathematicians, artists, photographers, etc ... and yet they will rely on those skills, on their own or combined, pretty much every single day of their lives.
Comment by rmunn 18 hours ago
LLMs, at least the current crop, are skill multipliers. If your skill is positive and large, you'll get great results. If your skill is positive and small, you'll get small results. If your skill is negative, the LLM will harm you more than it helps you.
Comment by SamBam 1 day ago
At the moment, I would never encourage any of my students to go into software engineering. It seems to me that's rapidly becoming a field where a small competitive handful will be making millions and everyone else will be unemployed.
That said, I have no problem teaching some programming. We're going to be making autonomous greenhouses soon, with windows that open or whatever, and they'll be using Scratch to program their micro:bits.
Anything that empowers you to do stuff is a good thing.
Comment by bigfishrunning 1 day ago
Comment by jayknight 1 day ago
Because it makes your brain think through problems, breaking them down to the point you can build a solution from the smallest pieces. AI may be a big part of the future, but we need to maintain our own human creativity and problem solving skills, and learning the tools that are available will help us to build and create useful things throughout our lives.
Comment by elviejo 1 day ago
Why do we teach them to read, we have text to voice?
Why do we teach them to broom, we have Roombas?
Why do we teach them to do the dishes, we have dish-washers?
</sarcasm>
Comment by omegacombinator 1 day ago
Comment by vatsachak 1 day ago
Comment by Norlo 12 hours ago