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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

You are right that it is the rapid feedback that really helps with teaching. I don't think you need a graphical language though, just an IDE oriented toward rapid feedback. Putting a 3rd grader in Eclipse and having to compile and build a jar to see the effects of a line of code would be horrible. But IDEs like Processing Development Environment or Dr.Racket have great tight feedback loops.

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> You are right that it is the rapid feedback that really helps with teaching

And possibly with obtaining an intuition about whatever it is that you are manipulating. Maybe "direct manipulation" is mostly about that rapid feedback, rather than the concreteness of the objects?

I know that when I hooked up an "as-you-type" evaluator[1] to my experimental programming language[2], I learned more about problems with the language in a minute than I had previously in days or weeks. The feedback bandwidth is incredible, and the short cycle times have a more than linear effect.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sypkOhE-ufs&t=57s

[2] http://objective.st

True, it's kind of a shame that more of the features from Bred Victor's demos haven't made it into mainstream IDE's, such as:-

Inventing on Principle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII (He has a handful of great demos on Youtube and Vimeo).

Another interesting source is Epic's Unreal Engine Dev tools - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DshYHUvLaDc

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