5 ms·

What we've learned from a year of live coding

52 points by ejfox 14y ago

poezn 14y ago
This is pretty amazing. Granted, I'm friends with the authors (@enjalot, @mrejfox), but Tributary has easily become one of my most used tools on a daily basis.
yesimahuman 14y ago
Wow, I just played with the basic example, and being able to "slide" an integer in my code and watch the visualization update in realtime is pretty interesting! Looking forward to playing with this, nice work.
ptvan 14y ago
as a designer (not a coder as much), tributary helps me realize my concepts quicker by helping with some of the technical stuff like automagically linking csv and json files. my go-to workflow is finding a d3.js example (e.g. from bostock's blocks http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ ) that has some components in common with what i want to accomplish, and then hacking/repurposing it to get what i need. sharing my tributary inlets makes it super easy to get feedback on what im doing wrong, and changing variables with sliders is now difficult to live without. being able to change the parameters of animations/simulations and see the results in real time is pretty incredible.
timtamboy63 14y ago
Definitely cool, but must the page be so ugly?
- ejfox 14y ago
  What would you improve? Always looking for useful feedback! Cheers
  - usea 14y ago
    The embedded font renders very poorly in Windows. The page lags a ton while scrolling. Some of the demos linked freeze my browser for several minutes if I click on them. In Opera none of the examples work (no output at all).
  - nawitus 14y ago
    I'm not the op, but I dislike the font and the colorful background (header).
    - ejfox 14y ago
      Makes sense to me. Lightened up the background a bit- any better? https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc18978ba698078c030868d2ce69c3d9004c668d?diff-0=1-48 https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc189...
      - nawitus 14y ago
        That's better, but I would probably still extend the solid-color background to the top of the page, so the background doesn't clash with the text at all.
  - ptvan 14y ago
    i think some people may not get that the header itself is a tributary math example ... link it up? ;) theres a difference between creating pixel perfect polished marketing sites and showcasing an evolving prototyping tool
  - joelg236 14y ago
    It could just be me, but the page loaded very slowly and was laggy while scrolling. A lot of graphics going on.
    - tuananh 14y ago
      laggy as hell for me here.
      - boggzPit 14y ago
        for me it was really good
  - yaxu 14y ago
    I think it looks quite nice. I was looking for more about what you'd actually learned, rather than a list of projects though.
- boggzPit 14y ago
  This is pretty subjective, or? I personally find it very good. You should learn to give feedback and not complain.
prezjordan 14y ago
Very cool, reminds me of the interactive widget used in the Khan Academy CS program [1]. I believe John Resig [2] developed it. [1]: http://khanacademy.org/cs http://khanacademy.org/cs [2]: https://github.com/Khan/canvas-editor https://github.com/Khan/canvas-editor
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
It seems they make the same mistake as the Khan Academy computer science editor [1] does. Bret says something about it in his learnable programming [2] post: > The programming environment exhibits the same ruthless abbreviation as this hypothetical cooking show. We see code on the left and a result on the right, but it's the steps in between which matter most. The computer traces a path through the code, looping around loops and calling into functions, updating variables and incrementally building up the output. We see none of this. I mean, this is a nice start, but we still have lots of work to do before we really understand what we are doing in this area. [1] http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ [2] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
- lelandbatey 14y ago
  Seriously, the ability to "step through" a program is HUGELY helpful for learning what programming does. I remember learning the beginnings of programming in Visual Basic for Applications inside Excel 2003. The best feature was the ability to "walk through" the program, with a yellow line highlighting the current code being executed and a window that showed all the variables and their outputs in a highly readable format. Those two things really helped me as a kid learn what programming looked like.
- shurcooL 14y ago
  It is both a very nice start, and there is definitely lots of room for improvement. I'm working in this very area too. One other thing I can add is that, IMO, it's very valuable to be able to easily execute a subset of the entire program (the tool should do everything it can to make the process easy, you just supply the necessary inputs).
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    > One other thing I can add is that, IMO, it's very valuable to be able to easily execute a subset of the entire program Sounds sort of like Bracha's stance. I think we should just focus on making the feedback better over an entire program execution. And we could make defining unit tests easy, which would provide the context needed to test smaller parts of the program.

52 points by ejfox 14y ago

poezn 14y ago

This is pretty amazing. Granted, I'm friends with the authors (@enjalot, @mrejfox), but Tributary has easily become one of my most used tools on a daily basis.

yesimahuman 14y ago

Wow, I just played with the basic example, and being able to "slide" an integer in my code and watch the visualization update in realtime is pretty interesting! Looking forward to playing with this, nice work.

ptvan 14y ago

as a designer (not a coder as much), tributary helps me realize my concepts quicker by helping with some of the technical stuff like automagically linking csv and json files. my go-to workflow is finding a d3.js example (e.g. from bostock's blocks http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ ) that has some components in common with what i want to accomplish, and then hacking/repurposing it to get what i need. sharing my tributary inlets makes it super easy to get feedback on what im doing wrong, and changing variables with sliders is now difficult to live without. being able to change the parameters of animations/simulations and see the results in real time is pretty incredible.

timtamboy63 14y ago

Definitely cool, but must the page be so ugly?

ejfox 14y ago
What would you improve? Always looking for useful feedback! Cheers
- usea 14y ago
  The embedded font renders very poorly in Windows. The page lags a ton while scrolling. Some of the demos linked freeze my browser for several minutes if I click on them. In Opera none of the examples work (no output at all).
- nawitus 14y ago
  I'm not the op, but I dislike the font and the colorful background (header).
  - ejfox 14y ago
    Makes sense to me. Lightened up the background a bit- any better? https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc18978ba698078c030868d2ce69c3d9004c668d?diff-0=1-48 https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc189...
    - nawitus 14y ago
      That's better, but I would probably still extend the solid-color background to the top of the page, so the background doesn't clash with the text at all.
- ptvan 14y ago
  i think some people may not get that the header itself is a tributary math example ... link it up? ;) theres a difference between creating pixel perfect polished marketing sites and showcasing an evolving prototyping tool
- joelg236 14y ago
  It could just be me, but the page loaded very slowly and was laggy while scrolling. A lot of graphics going on.
  - tuananh 14y ago
    laggy as hell for me here.
    - boggzPit 14y ago
      for me it was really good
- yaxu 14y ago
  I think it looks quite nice. I was looking for more about what you'd actually learned, rather than a list of projects though.
boggzPit 14y ago
This is pretty subjective, or? I personally find it very good. You should learn to give feedback and not complain.

prezjordan 14y ago

Very cool, reminds me of the interactive widget used in the Khan Academy CS program [1]. I believe John Resig [2] developed it. [1]: http://khanacademy.org/cs http://khanacademy.org/cs [2]: https://github.com/Khan/canvas-editor https://github.com/Khan/canvas-editor

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

It seems they make the same mistake as the Khan Academy computer science editor [1] does. Bret says something about it in his learnable programming [2] post: > The programming environment exhibits the same ruthless abbreviation as this hypothetical cooking show. We see code on the left and a result on the right, but it's the steps in between which matter most. The computer traces a path through the code, looping around loops and calling into functions, updating variables and incrementally building up the output. We see none of this. I mean, this is a nice start, but we still have lots of work to do before we really understand what we are doing in this area. [1] http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ [2] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

lelandbatey 14y ago
Seriously, the ability to "step through" a program is HUGELY helpful for learning what programming does. I remember learning the beginnings of programming in Visual Basic for Applications inside Excel 2003. The best feature was the ability to "walk through" the program, with a yellow line highlighting the current code being executed and a window that showed all the variables and their outputs in a highly readable format. Those two things really helped me as a kid learn what programming looked like.
shurcooL 14y ago
It is both a very nice start, and there is definitely lots of room for improvement. I'm working in this very area too. One other thing I can add is that, IMO, it's very valuable to be able to easily execute a subset of the entire program (the tool should do everything it can to make the process easy, you just supply the necessary inputs).
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  > One other thing I can add is that, IMO, it's very valuable to be able to easily execute a subset of the entire program Sounds sort of like Bracha's stance. I think we should just focus on making the feedback better over an entire program execution. And we could make defining unit tests easy, which would provide the context needed to test smaller parts of the program.