jpolitz

10 ms·

1. 31.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   There is no MOOC I know of that uses Pyret (yet). Racket is great! If you're already deep into Racket, I wouldn't say stop to try Pyret unless you particularly have the goal of learning more languages, or there's something a
2. 32.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   Hey fellow Swattie! [Actually, I'm at UC San Diego as of this fall, so I'm a former fellow Swattie, I suppose :-) ] The programming languages course in question ( https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~jpolitz/cs91&#x2
3. 33.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   Thanks for the feedback. > The docs you link for the "dead simple animation framework" assumes I understand templates; that's hardly dead simple The idea of "templates" comes with a lot of baggage from C++-land.
4. 34.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   Yes! You can contribute to the Bootstrap project directly: http://www.bootstrapworld.org/contribute/index.shtml
5. 35.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   Thanks for the advice! What are some examples where a teaching language has followed these points and succeeded? What is the weirdness and/or pet features you see in Pyret?
6. 36.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   This is useful feedback. I think this pair of comments combines to give a decent answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13186997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187379
7. 37.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   Perhaps `unfun` can be incorporated into this: http://blog.brownplt.org/2014/04/01/var-vs-yar.html
8. 38.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   The readability, unintuitive, and "odd syntax" comments are somewhat subjective, though I'd curious to hear what parts are odd and unintuitive for you. I linked to a perspective on where Pyret fits in in another similar answe
9. 39.▲
   by jpolitz 10y ago

   This paper ( http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffkf-... ) linked from "Why Pyret" ( http://www.pyret.org/pyret-code/ ) is a long answer to "why teach
10. 40.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Pyret's runtime is entirely built on JavaScript (seriously: you can load https://code.pyret.org/editor , then turn off the network, and your IDE still works), and Pyret programs compile to JavaScript. At the command-li
11. 41.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Thanks for the feedback – we've gotten this a few times, and I think the homepage is targeted too much towards getting across Pyret's design to an already multi-lingual audience, and not enough towards actual beginner uses of the
12. 42.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    This is very difficult to argue empirically, and I don't claim to know what's going on in students' minds. In particular, I don't know what "most people in the world" struggle with, just those students in the
13. 43.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Pedagogically, the nice thing about the examples/tests just being code for beginners is that they are... just code! Once we've taught students about function calls and values, it's a small jump to write an example with "
14. 44.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    I responded to a similar comment in another thread from a pedagogic perspective, I hope this answer gives some perspective on how we approach this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13186216 Also, Pyret can be used
15. 45.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    It's true, Pyret gets ideas from a handful of places, not just Python. From a student or instructor's point of view, it is serving a lot of the same ends as some of Python's choices: Toplevel code runs as a script without cer
16. 46.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    I'm curious which parts look (more) complicated to you. For some perspective, when teaching Pyret to total beginners, we start with arithmetic and calls to library functions, then build up to function definitions and examples. At that
17. 47.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Pyret (and the Bootstrap curricula in particular, where we use both Scheme and Pyret [ http://bootstrapworld.org/] ) really strives to avoid the purely "bottom up" approach. Curricula in Pyret focus on building game
18. 48.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Also a plug for ChessNetwork, who posts 20-min summaries of games the day after, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vgn7OXug3M
19. 49.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Self-reply for posterity. Here's a sketched-out comparison of generators vs. the manual strategy we use in Pyret (this isn't _exactly_ what Pyret generated code looks like, but it's close): https://www.measurethat
20. 50.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    > doesn't every recursive function have an iterative version True in the abstract, yes. But it's a sophisticated compiler indeed that turns something like a recursive binary tree traversal into a loop (it would need to synthes
21. 51.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Thanks for the good vibes!
22. 52.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    No problem. Thanks for asking bluntly about generators. It made me write some more experiments using them. Right now, the main thing that I think stands in the way of them being a good solution for Pyret is that they have limited stack de
23. 53.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    I don't know what you mean by "it doesn't really matter." Surely there's a cost to using generators instead of regular function calls and returns, right? That's where the overhead would come from, because gen
24. 54.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    My conjecture: Scheduling with priority is pretty easy across these systems. The dependency graph transfer would be outside the scope of what they already tackle, and require new engineering. In Pyret, I prototyped virtual threads at one p
25. 55.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    The main difference is that all of the use cases I mentioned necessarily don't distinguish between calls/functions that may pause, and calls that don't (it's just the semantics of those languages that arbitrary calls mig
26. 56.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Part of these notes, Fiber [0], reminds me of a half-joking "corollary" to Greenspun's Tenth Rule (credit @shriramkmurthi): Any sufficiently complicated JavaScript program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-r
27. 57.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Thanks for the kind words! Firefox performs better than it did, because the whole language has gradually increased performance, but still the worst of the major browsers. It's worth writing down a bit about that here, just for others
28. 58.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Thanks for the feedback! To add to what you said, this is exactly the kind of situation where we design features that _may_ not scale well, but are remarkably useful in teaching contexts. Having test cases inline with code is massively usef
29. 59.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    Another important metric: a handful of C programmers can write arbitrarily more buffer overflows than thousands of Java or Ruby programmers.
30. 60.▲
    by jpolitz 10y ago

    It is a real issue. The programming languages and software engineering communities have been working on evaluating software artifacts for a few years now: http://www.artifact-eval.org/ This doesn't address open access