Waterbear - a visual language for Javacript | Hacker News Reader

Waterbear - a visual language for Javacript

waterbearlang.com

75 pointstoni22 comments

Might want to check MIT's OpenBlocks ( http://education.mit.edu/openblocks ), which is related to Scratch (listed as inspiration by Waterbear) and includes code from StarLogo (slcodeblocks) (also listed as inspiration) and is being refactored "to make the code more amenable to inclusion to other projects". One of the recent uses of OpenBlocks was Google's AppInventor.

Kudos to the Waterbear author! Loved to see it done with JS, HTML5 and CSS3. One less thing in my list of "things that I want to see in the world but may have to build it myself". Watching the repo already! :)

Cool editor UI works in FF 4 but Run does nothing, not even for the demo script.

Try adding

     -webkit-user-select: none;
     -khtml-user-select: none;
     -moz-user-select: none;
     -o-user-select: none;
     user-select: none;

So text in the blocks can't be selected

Shameless plug: my project is a visual programming language - which is actually seriously usable for real things - and exports to Javascript + HTML5 canvas: http://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=8468 End shameless plug :)

Awesome this is just like http://scratch.mit.edu and

google has a product called app inventor.

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

Hope it is now easily accessible as a web app... Cool UI.

Obligatory link to my own visual programming language targeting home/building automation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36xoBZVQ8c&feature=playe... (blog post: http://nitrogen.posterous.com/kinect-home-automation-goes-ht...).

P.S. Running the included Waterbear demo script seems to do nothing on Firefox 4 and Chrome 12 on Linux.

Thats very cool! The Kinect video with regions reminds me of my uni undergrad final year project (except that your region stuff is much cooler than ours was - cheaper too): http://dublindan.posterous.com/things-ive-worked-on-1

EDIT: pasted wrong link first time :-/

Reminds me of Eros (http://conal.net/papers/Eros/) and tangible functional programming (http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/TV). Both by Conal Elliott.

edit: Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJ8N0giqzw

A working demo would be useful to see how to use this after all.

There is a demo. There are a number of controls on the top right, and one is labeled "Demos", though there is only one demo at the moment, and it doesn't seem complete. I suspect this is still very much a work in progress. I seriously doubt the author intended for it to be shown.

It doesn't seem to do anything.

My experience exactly. I tried writing my own script and it didn't work, and then I loaded the demo script and it didn't work. I think a screencast would be nice even if it never gets broken again.

wow that looks brilliant (from what I can see), do you think its at all useful to people that actually know javascript? or is it more of a tool for those that dont/are learning?

From the github page, the intention is that it's an introductory educational programming tool, that provides a concrete visual syntax that's easier for kids to get to grips with than the usual textual one.

It looks really useful as an add-on to a level editor for a game. Custom scripts that designers can create!

    Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token {

Can't get it to run. I'm in Chrome. Trying FF now.

Ah, neat, Scratch in the browser.

About time. ;)

I'm very drunk and will edit this later. Props!

Nice work! GPL I hope?

Apache license, v2, per the source at github: https://github.com/dethe/waterbear

Oops, clicked too fast on the controls to read. Stupid. Thanks!

Does not work on android chrome. Can't even scroll

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