Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

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I also belong to the skeptic crowd as far as fancy CS teaching languages are concerned. I think there's much greater value in a first language that's three things: dead simple, useful, and which lets you poke through the abstractions.

A lot of us hackers here today cut our teeth on BASIC, even me as a 90's kid. I remember the joy at having automated away rote chemistry or physics homework, and in hindsight realise that writing a working BASIC program made me learn stuff better and deeper and quicker than the homework I avoided.

I have a four-year-old now, and the other day she asked if I could count to a thousand million. I answered "Nope, but I'll show you Mr. Fortran, he can." Give kids a DO loop, some arrays and WRITE statements and they will conquer the world. For learning, it's hard to beat the simplicity of

    program count
    do i=1,1000000000
      if i % 1000000 == 0 then
        write(*,*) i," Million"
      end if
    end do
    end program

And I'm sorry to report, your examples don't convince me further of Pyret. (I'm a Python fan, BTW.) The docs you link for the "dead simple animation framework" assumes I understand templates; that's hardly dead simple. And while cloud integration is all cool for spreadsheets, if you did the same with Pandas in Python it would take no more lines of code, be no more complicated, but would start you on a tool that tons of people use for Real Work every day in a wide range of industries and sciences. Not just limited to interacting with half-baked Google Sheets data, you could read anything from HDF5 produced at CERN to SQL data from NASDAQ.

There are no "templates" in the language, so the docs couldn't possibly have required you to "understand templates". You may not have understood what you read, I'll grant you that. That may or may not be a fault of the documentation or the language. It could even be the fault of a hasty, pre-judging reader…

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. If we were doing this with C++ templates, I'd agree, because the errors are abysmal and the types are difficult to write.

As an example, we teach students to pick "the type of their reactor's state" as a useful pedagogic step in physics simulations, which is almost always a (maybe nested) tuple of numbers. But writing out the types (the instantiation of "a" in to-draw, on-tick, etc) is a useful and quite concrete activity. Since we have them working with types in their contracts already, they're equipped to think through data definitions that way.

That kind of type-based reasoning is a kind of thinking that isn't just loops and arithmetic, also needs language and curricular support, and is something we try to support early and often.

> if you did the same with Pandas in Python...

We could do more to integrate with existing, powerful libraries. Since we've found it useful to be browser-based to make things widely accessible, we'd probably be looking for similar things in JavaScript, but the point is well-taken.

That said, tables do more than work with just "half-baked" Google spreadsheets. The interface is generic to support other formats – the Google Sheets import is a library, and a Pyret/JS programmer can write library code to import from other sources (this is of course work, and won't magically appear, but the language supports more than Google Sheets by design). In addition, tabular data is built-in to the language enough to use it for _testing_ example tables (and functions over tables) with the same primitives as testing other functions. And the animation framework can spit out tables that trace execution of the animation, so students can generate their own data from simulations.

All of these things live together inside the same language that has other features we've found useful for beginners, like more authentic math (not just bignums but rationals), easy image creation, example/testing support, carefully-crafted error messages targeted at beginner vocabulary, and so on.

> I have a four-year-old now, and the other day she asked if I could count to a thousand million. I answered "Nope, but I'll show you Mr. Fortran, he can."

That's just awesome :-)

Thanks for the response!

> The idea of "templates" comes with a lot of baggage from C++-land. If we were doing this with C++ templates, I'd agree, because the errors are abysmal and the types are difficult to write.

You're spot on. I suspect most people familiar with template-ish expressions come from C++, where you encounter quite a few projects that are "templates all the way down" (looking at you, OpenFOAM).

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