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"and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning." - Bret Victor http://worrydre
by tokyodude 8y ago
"and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning." - Bret Victor
http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
like many things "better" is often not what wins. Kind of ironic that many of the "learning about learning" ideas also came from MIT
- olavk 8y agoThat is really interesting reading! Maybe you should submit it as a separate story?
- whywhywhywhy 8y agoAs much as I absolutely love the work of Bret Victor, Processing actually shipped and is teaching people every day how to code. Although he's achieved a massive amount of research in the field, I'm still waiting for absolutely any of it to ship into systems and actually teach people.
- tokyodude 8y agoI agree, shipping is better than not, but that article lists lots of low-hanging fruit that would help users of Processing. One example is designing for autocomplete. He asserts that shape(type, ...) is better than square(...), triangle(...), circle(...) because once you know `shape` then typing `sh` finds you all the shapes where as you have no idea what shapes are available when you have to guess all function names (circle?, ellipse?, hexagon?, rhumbas?) IIRC there were other low-hanging fruit.
- olavk 8y agoNot sure I like the suggested autocomplete on a string though. But using namespaces or similar like Shape.Triangle... would autocomplete better. I know that Microsoft deliberately designs the .net API's to facilitate exploring an API by using autocomplete.