I'd also recommend `:degree <= 0` as the check, rather than `= 0`, just in case someone passes `5.01` to the function (which would cause an infinite loop as you'd never hit exactly 0). But yes, if that was just coded into the comment box then it looks pretty good.
Where the heck did the sudden vitriol come from? I went through the HN comments of the person you're replying to and found nothing like the kind of thing you're replying to in the first several pages. If he said something months ago that you're bringing up, you might want to link to it, because at it stands it feels like you just suddenly started ranting about politics in the middle of a conversation about teaching kids to code. Which is... kind of offputting, you know?
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.
Set showdead=true and you can see his fanatical arguments in defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, and attacks on other people who disagreed with him, which rightly got his multiple comments flagged dead.
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:
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):
Don't worry, I didn't spend much time digging through comment history. Thanks for the links; I'm about to have to leave my computer and do something else for several hours, so I can't look at them right now. But since you replied to one of my comments it'll be easy to find them again via the "threads" link, so I'll look at them later when I'm back at the computer. (And I did look at the first one; Logo Adventure is exactly the kind of thing I love to come across, so thanks for that!)
I'm not sure what caused him to lash out at me like that, I thought I was being pretty reasonable (albeit very casual with terms like BS), I even made sure to say multiple times that it was my opinions and views, and that maybe I just don't "get it".
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.
As I explained quite clearly, with examples and links, you're not arguing in good faith. Not about Snap!, and not about Musk either. The pattern is quite clear. If you were, you would have looked at the links to evidence I gave you, and responded to that, instead of just repeating what you said and proving that you didn't read or comprehend anything I posted.
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?
> 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"?
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.
> but how many are actually doing AI programming in Snap?
Remember, I am still waiting for your definition of what "_really_ programming" is, that classifies Scheme as "real" programming language, but not Snap!.
Clue: it's impossible to make such a definition, because Snap! is fully as powerful as Scheme (and not in the trivial sense of "Turing Completeness"), just easier for kids to use.
Again, you're only proving that you didn't read or understand a thing I wrote. I already gave you links to Ken Kahn's eCraft2Learn project and Jen Mönig's demos, but obviously you didn't look at any of it.
Since you refuse to look at or acknowledge anything I link to, I will walk you through some of it here.
TL;DR: Ken and Jens and others are successfully using pure Snap! to teach AI and machine learning to kids. This directly contradicts all of your accusations. Here is the proof.
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.
From 1995-present, he developed a visual programming language called ToonTalk, that looks and feels like a 3D video game, for teaching programming and high level CS concepts like concurrency and message passing to kids.
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 and Computer Science to kids, now with Snap! and his eCraft2Learn project. Here are his 172 citations on google scholar:
Here's a video of 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 accusations 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.
What's new in Snap! 11 - Data - Extensions - Neural Networks
My (Jens Mönig's) 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:
Transcript excerpts about how Snap! teaches AI programming and CS concepts to kids. All quotes are from Jens Mönig's closing keynote address at SnapCon25 (lightly edited for clarity), with links to the video timestamps so you can verify each quote's source of truth:
NOT A TOY: IT TEACHES THE HIGH-LEVEL IDEAS
Abstraction has nothing to do with technology -- it is philosophy
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
> "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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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?
> 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
I'm well aware that Snap has this stuff in it, and I understand it is used to teach and get kids interested about programming, I know.
I still do not understand why you'd want to learn AI with Snap/Scratch. I don't think that's a very controversial opinion?
If you just want to show kids some basic stuff okay sure, why not.
By the time you'd want to mess with neural networks, I think it'd be best to just use Python or something, not wrestle with this...
I appreciate you being so thorough with your references and the transcripts, and I think it's cool and interesting.
I'm just saying that for me I don't get why I'd use this or try to do these complex things in this Scratch format rather than jumping on an actual language where I don't need to rely on these extensions or new features, and I'd be learning a real language that is actually used in the real world.
And like, saying that Scratch is a toy language, I don't think that's a very controversial thing to say, so if I said the same thing about this, why be so offended over it? calling it BS, I can get that, but it was never directed towards anyone specifically, it was towards visual programming languages in general like Scratch. They serve a purpose, sure, but in my view, a very limited one. And I still don't see this being used like other languages for real stuff, aside from limited demos and exercises for kids.
You can say I'm wrong, that's completely fine. But I think you're missing my point here.
You keep conspicuously avoiding answering my question about your definition of "_really_ programming", because it paints you into a corner and proves you are wrong, and you don't want to admit it.
>I still do not understand why you'd want to learn AI with Snap/Scratch.
At this point you're just desparately sealioning. You are intentionally pretending to be stupid, and I don't believe your act.
>And like, saying that Scratch is a toy language, [...]
Please stop right there. You are moving the goalposts. This is a discussion about Snap!, not Scratch. You made those false claims about Snap!, not Scratch. I've proven Snap! is not a toy language already.
Conspicuously attempting to move the goalposts to a totally different language does not refute what I said, it just once again proves my point that you are not arguing in good faith.
> You keep conspicuously avoiding answering my question about your definition of "_really_ programming", because it paints you into a corner and proves you are wrong, and you don't want to admit it.
No. Almost anyone here would be fine with someone saying that using Scratch/Snap is not really programming in the same way that you'd use real languages to do stuff. It's obvious what it means.
> At this point you're just desparately sealioning. You are intentionally pretending to be stupid, and I don't believe your act.
No I am not, but are you pretending to be stupid here?
Otherwise, why wouldn't almost all AI learning and demos be done with Snap if it's so amazing? Why is it only done in these conference recordings that have like 500 views on youtube?
You're convinced that this Scratch-like "language" is somehow so incredible that you cannot criticize it or claim that it only fulfills a specific niche and that its not the same as actual general purpose languages that we use in the real world like Python, JS, C, C++, Go and so on.
> Please stop right there. You are moving the goalposts. This is a discussion about Snap!, not Scratch.
Same thing applies. I don't care how much this Scratch-like language is extended, it doesn't matter, my point still applies, it's not useful beyond a specific niche which seems to be to teach kids basic things about logic and programming, not actual software engineering.
If you would've read what I wrote:
> And like, saying that Scratch is a toy language, I don't think that's a very controversial thing to say, so if I said the same thing about this, why be so offended over it? calling it BS, I can get that, but it was never directed towards anyone specifically, it was towards visual programming languages in general like Scratch. They serve a purpose, sure, but in my view, a very limited one. And I still don't see this being used like other languages for real stuff, aside from limited demos and exercises for kids.
If you read this part fully:
"And like, saying that Scratch is a toy language, I don't think that's a very controversial thing to say, so if I said the same thing about this, why be so offended over it?"
You would see that I am indeed talking about Snap, not just Scratch.
Do I have to believe your "act"?
Also, you seem to be consistently hostile, maybe because you're frustrated at the fact that I am being very reasonable here, and you're trying to force me into liking your language or whatever and admit that its super useful language and it's not working, because you're used to always having your way?
I have gone out of my way to be reasonable with you and argue with you in good faith, and you keep bringing insults and accusations and keep implying that I'm a Nazi or something.
Think about it, you're so upset over the fact that I don't consider a colored block drag and drop interface/system a real programming language that's used in the real world that you're doing all this and constantly attacking me and getting angry over my very reasonable arguments
It's unhealthy and you should maybe ask one of those friends if what you're doing is reasonable or not. Maybe they can get you the help you need.
> 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:
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.
> My belief is that learning is done best when there is a connection to something real, not just a simulation or an exercise.
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?
> 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?
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.
> However it was not to the degree where this guy's response was warranted at all. Not one bit.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> I would say Scheme is programming because it's literally a Lisp dialect, and Lisp is still used so.. yeah.
Snap! is literally a Scheme dialect.
So by your own definition, Snap! is a "real" programming language. I'm glad I finally convinced you to change your mind when confronted with irrefutable evidence!
But that's an weird definition that makes languages like Scheme and Snap! stop being "real" programming if Lisp stops being used. Is that really what you mean? A language can change from "real" to "not real" depending on how much another language is used?
Again, please drill down and elaborate and refine and debug your definition of what a "real" programming language, because it has a lot of holes and inconsistencies in it. See if you can whack all those moles.
> Nobody is using Snap in production
Teaching children AI programming and Computer Science concepts IS PRODUCTION. It's producing the next generation of human beings. Those children are live and shipping in the real world. There is no dev or qa deployment.
> Again reminding you to self-reflect because this is unhinged. What is wrong with you?
Musk making a Nazi salute twice on live international TV was definitely unhinged, we can both agree. Are you unhinged enough to do it too? Even recorded on youtube, under your hn handle, if you're too cowardly to do it under your own name like unhinged Musk did? Why are you defending a man so unhinged that you refuse to do the same thing he does?
There's a limit to how long the name can be, even in Snap! — not an enforced limit as far as I know, but a practical one. You don't want the block you're dragging around to be thousands of pixels wide, it's very inconvenient. So people are naturally going to rename "convert all the upper case letters in the input text ___ into lower case letters" (where ___ represents the input slot) into "convert ___ to lower case" at some point, because they get tired of that one block being so much wider than every other block around it. (Edit to add: especially if they're snapping it into the input of a `map` block, which itself is the list input of "keep items (predicate) from (list)" block. That would get unwieldly really fast).
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.
If you mean the tables in the https://eddie.codes/posts/pandas-should-go-extinct/#i-have-b... section, it looks like those came straight from the Amazon paper, in which case __eddie__ shouldn't fix them, on general "quote accurately even if the quoted document has mistakes in it" principles. (Though a [sic] might help).
Cute title; I thought I was about to read a contrarian ecologist saying "a species that is so very specialized in its diet and finicky in its reproductive behavior doesn't deserve, evolutionarily speaking, to survive". (Seriously, it's seriously freakin' difficult to get pandas to reproduce in captivity). And while my knee-jerk reaction would be "maybe, but we should still preserve them because we can", I was prepared to see if the author had a serious argument to present.
Instead it's a cute bait-and-switch title, and the article tells you upfront that it's actually about the Python `pandas` library. Which I think I've encountered maybe once in my entire career (I'm not in the data-science field), so I don't have much meaningful to say about the article itself. I just want to commend the author on fooling me with the title. This is the kind of "clickbait" I can respect and actually wish there was a little bit more of sometimes. A nice chuckle, then a real article.
There is indeed a whole book about ecosystems and charismatic megafauna called "Do We Need Pandas?: The Uncomfortable Truth About Biodiversity"[1]. And there is debate among naturalists [2]
> Seriously, it's seriously freakin' difficult to get pandas to reproduce in captivity
It is impossible, and has been tried many times by many people, to reproduce Octopus vulgari in captivity. Their reproductive behaviour looks also quite weird for us (the mother always die). Yet they thrive in the wild unless over fished.
because breeding intelligent creatures generally requires keeping them happy. When treated like a farm aniaml, many high cognition anaimals will refuse to reproduce, just look at how bad life has become for average humans, and predictably, humans are starting to refuse to reproduce.
My point was that "captivity reproduction" should not be a key point in the viability of a specie. Octopus can live in captivity (albeit stressed!), but for some reason their larva don't survive. Do they deserve to go extinct for that? They were able to survive for 500 million years, through some massive extinctions, looks good enough to me.
That's more true in some locations than in others. There are places where the reported quality of life is quite a bit higher than others. I see comments like yours a lot on HN, and I'm starting to suspect that the average HN commenter is more likely to be living in some of the poorly-run big cities than in the better-run small-to-medium-sized towns. (Specifics can, and will vary. But on average I've found I'm much happier living in a medium-sized town than in a megacity, and I've also found the city governments of medium-sized towns to be more likely to be competent. Perhaps I've just been lucky in the medium towns I've lived in, though; I'd need far more data before I was certain of the thesis).
Point is, if you're miserable in the place where you are, consider whether moving to a different town is feasible for you. It's not always an option for many people, for many varied reasons. But it's definitely something to consider. If it turns out you can do it, sometimes taking that risk can pay off in the long run.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look.
DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.
That somehow hurts me to hear more than anything. I remember days spent in my youth trawling through Google search for anime fandoms and homework answers. Joke used to be that beyond page 1 is the definition of desperation and in the 00s that was definitely true but I discovered a lot of cool distractions in that desperation. This feels like they killed Google Reader again.
Don't know how modern this is, but I remember being disappointed that despite Google claiming it had billions of results, you could only see a few pages' worth.
Looking now, I've just noticed they no longer give a count of results.
I don't know how global consistency is actually useful, but I can easily think of ways it is less convenient.
For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?
These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.
I wouldn't mind that one. That a man in the US and a woman in Japan would get different results for a search for "sushi restaurant" is perfectly reasonable (even if the woman in Japan was searching in English).
It's when two people in the same neighborhood got different results for the same search that I said "wait a minute, they're personalizing search results now for ad-targeting purposes" and ditched them. The potential for them to deliberately hide things from you was too great.
When I search Python I should get the programming language but when my neighbour searches Python he should get snakes. That is a valid use of personalised search.
Good example, which is why both you and the other commenter gave it. And if that's as far as it went it wouldn't have bothered me so much; it was when conservative people I know were getting different results from liberal people for the same search terms that I started to realize the potential for an echo chamber, and decided it was a bad idea.
It's good for your mental health to be exposed to arguments you disagree with. Many times they will be bad arguments and you can dismiss them, but it's good to know what the people who disagree with you actually believe. And sometimes, just sometimes, you might see something that makes you realize that it's your own worldview that was mistaken, and adjust your worldview to better fit reality. If your search results only show you echo-chamber results that already agree with yours, you'll rarely learn the areas where you were mistaken. (And nearly everyone is mistaken about some things; the person who is right about everything is a rare creature indeed, and you should never gamble that you're that person).
They injected crypto donate buttons below, for example, tweets to make them look like twitter had a donate option. The sites were sent over https, it was mitm
The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind.
If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.
I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.
people have been putting their fuckass blogs with 0.5 visitors a day behind Cloudflare long before the increase in bot traffic. and that increase makes fuck all any difference for them anyway.
It's probably cheaper to switch your ISP to one that your target site does not block, than to pay someone else to buy that connection and proxy all your traffic through them.
I think curated directories from prehistory might make a comeback eventually, maybe combined with a search engine that indexes only the whitelisted websites. ironically, we can use LLMs to filter out AI slop by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio, which is atrocious for AI slop and ESL slop that preceded it.
It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put together enough clues to figure out your identity even without your Google login cookie).
Yes, the fact that they could do it does not prove that they were doing it, not right away. I ditched them as soon as I found out that they could do it, because I was absolutely certain that eventually, they would end up doing it. And I wanted neutral search results, not biased ones, even ones biased towards my own point of view.
I subscribe to The New York Times, if I am searching for a news event, I’d appreciate a site that’s not paywalled and I trust be the first result if it is reasonable.
The NYT watches an event like Trump making a crowd of supporters swear to "cheat like hell" and to vote even if they're not registered, and they turn it into headlines like "Trump leads supporters in a pledge to vote." They are no longer a reliable source of accurate information.
I am misunderstanding, I am seeing direct quotes, is it an unserious the tone that’s not in the article? Because they seem to be reporting his words accurately.
How u reliable personalised search results are depends on who controls the personalization and for what purpose.
I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.
Not true in this case; the original intent for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) was as an extension to Scratch. When the Scratch team decided not to merge it, the BYOB folks decided to build it into Snap! instead of abandoning the perfectly-functional code they'd written.
In Snap! version 12 they have added the ability to create tutorials, which are projects that load up with a limited set of blocks (you choose what set is available when creating the tutorial). This fixes the intimidation problem: you can even create a set of tutorials that, if the student goes through them in the recommended order, teaches the basics with just four or five blocks available at first, then slowly introduces concepts over time.
> 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.
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)
)
I haven't checked recently to see if they have finished the other half of that feature, the parse-Lisp-into-blocks half. But I know they want it to be in there; I forget what its status was last time I checked.
You can use the split and join blocks to get the code and turn it back into blocks, but it's not well documented like I mentioned earlier. You split a ringified script "by blocks" to get a list version, which you can then use the "[text] of [list]" block (it's the one with length selected by default in the dropdown). That allows you to get the "Lisp" version in code.
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.
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