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eah13on Skulpt: client side Python without preprocessing

https://github.com/skulpt/skulpt while you wait

eah13on Skulpt: client side Python without preprocessing

I think it's important to distinguish user groups. No solution is best for all of them.

For scientists or data analysts, jupyter notebooks are a great choice since they mirror the professional and research tools they'll use.

For web development, an in-browser IDE like Cloud9 would be my choice to get an arbitrary room of adults up to speed.

But for middle or high school audiences, or even adult beginners, solutions like the above are far too complex. It's easy to get a certain expert blindness, but a Jupyter notebook for instance can actually be a huge problem form someone trying to understand flow of control, since you can execute code blocks in an arbitrary order into the same runtime.

Tradeoffs between power and usability abound. Jupyter is a good blend. A full IDE is power. Skulpt prioritizes usability. Some group of users fits into each of these buckets.

So (surprise, surprise!) The meanings of 'best' and 'terrible' are highly dependent upon specific user needs.

eah13on Skulpt: client side Python without preprocessing

I'm a co-founder of Trinket and thought I'd explain why we chose Skulpt.

Client-side execution lets you do visual things that would be slow and complicated (maybe practically impossible) if you ran them server side. Visual results are one of the most important motivators for students learning to code.

Take our Sense HAT emulator, made in partnership with Raspberry Pi:

https://trinket.io/sense-hat

This uses 3D CSS and SVG to make a virtual Raspberry Pi that you can rotate around. The Sense HAT has a gyroscope, accelerometer, etc that kids can actually program to respond to these movements.

The alternative to this emulator was the Raspberry Pi Foundation sending boxes of computers to classrooms (which they still do). But the emulator makes this scalable while also synergizing with the computers: kids can download their code and run it on the real device if they want.

The next phase in the project is letting kids run their code in space. Mission Zero uses the emulator to let European kids get their code run on one of the Raspberry Pis in orbit on the International Space Station:

https://trinket.io/mission-zero

Skulpt makes this possible.

Why not Brython or RapydScript? Theoretically, either could do most of this. Skulpt is designed for the needs of teachers and learners. Those projects have slightly different goals (making Python a web scripting language and providing a Pythonic way to write JS, respectively) which may make them a better fit for your project but we've found Skulpt to meet our users' needs the best. Our users are teachers and students in middle and high school, and some undergrads, who want to write, run, and share programs and websites as quickly and easily as possible. They need reasonable speed, fidelity to Python and lots of fun visuals. Turtle, Matplotlib, and now the Sense HAT emulator provide the visuals.

Skulpt isn't perfect but it's got a great community and is getting better all the time. I think it's the clear best choice if your users are teaching or learning. And projects like Anvil (anvil.works) show how the project can work outside of education as well, in that case for non-specialist business analysts/ops people who would otherwise be stringing together spreadsheets.

eah13on Skulpt: client side Python without preprocessing

I can second this sentiment. Meredydd and Albert Jan have made a good deal of Skulpt's most technically interesting features (which in turn enable a more seamless user experience). I'm a cofounder of Trinket and we knew early on that this project was something we would use heavily and wanted to support. We support more languages now (including server side Python, Java, and with R coming soon) but our skulpt-based free Python trinket remains our most popular one.

Our users have benefitted hugely from contributions by Meredydd, Albert Jan, Michael Ebert, Marie Chatfield, Scott Rixner, Brad Miller, and a whole bunch of other contributors. Go team!

eah13on Skulpt: client side Python without preprocessing

I'm a big fan of datacamp. You should definitely give this a try. It would be great to expand the reach of your lessons without the infrastructure overhead of every user hitting your server with their code. Hit up the skulpt dev listserve if you want some help. Or I'm at elliott@trinket.io.

Plug: you could easily prototype this with Trinket embeds. Add #!/bin/python3 to the top of our Python (Skulpt) trinkets to get strict Py3 mode. Add data files via the + button (no directory support, so treat them as all in the local directory). Use the Share menu to get embed code. Paste. You've got your first interactive lesson. If your users like it, you can then decide whether and how to build skulpt in to the site.

eah13on Show HN: Snapmeet, Remote meetings with realtime notes and video, built with React

I second pretty much everything in here.In my meeting we were essentially working together grooming a github issue- I could imagine that issue being addable as a tab behind or instead of the notepad.

eah13on Show HN: Snapmeet, Remote meetings with realtime notes and video, built with React

we (your users) are your test suite :)

Nicely done- looking forward to the next iteration

eah13on Cathedrals, Bazaars, and in Between

I'd say yes. Another Cathedral bazzar is Meteor. Open source, but with a relatively centralized organization.

eah13on Stellar: 0 to 1M signups in 37 days

Wow! Amazing progress. Congrats Joyce & crew.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

Sounds like your relative had an above-median learning rate. But a median 10 year old could likely learn a new language to fluency in even less time.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

I'm happy to wade into that debate, because I think it's relevant. When this article first came out there were comments near the top questioning the relevance of this type of inquiry as, roughly, unscientific. I wanted to show how it fits into a scientific framework just fine.

You're likely right that an apology with less commitment could have been effective as well.

Interesting to think of Mead as the analog, and perhaps a more apt one. Thanks. Personally I'm much more familiar with biology and with Goodall. But, from my perspective cultural anthropology is a science whether or not it wants to be. The AAAs rejection of 'science' may be more indicative of science's rejection of inductive logic than anything.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

Startups, and startup founders as a whole are rare phenomena. Don't read anything more into the analogies than that. Thanks, though, for the word of caution.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

if code wasn't a human language we'd write it in binary, straight to disk.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

Interesting that you've found language study techniques useful. I also believe we should teach code like we teach other languages: http://blog.trinket.io/code-and-language/

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

I believe they're roughly synonymous, yes. The processes of aging and aculturation both involve an ossification of our ideas and concepts that make learning new ones comparatively difficult. Vinod Khosla has talked extensively about how he has to fight these processes in himself to bring a 'beginners mind' to bear on new startup ideas. The median effort required to do this is lower in younger people.

By the way, older people who share the characteristics of being only lightly acculturated (i.e. eccentric) share the relevant characteristics with children and may be able to learn things like languages with childlike speed. Hence, I believe, PG's observation that startup founders of any age tend to be weird, quirky, or poorly socialized in various ways.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

Agreed. A focus on gender is warranted, but not to the exclusion of other demographics. There are likely a great many large startups waiting to be built in each under-represented demographic. These startups aren't yet built because not enough domain experts have the technical ability and startup knowledge they need to build them. Which, I believe, is YC and 500's business rationale for encouraging diversity.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=language+learning+rates+...

It's well documented that the median language-learning speed/ability of younger people is greater than that of older people.

eah13on My boys love 1986 computing

In the beginning there was the command line (1999) is the best I know http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Stephenson-Comm...

Happy to hear suggestions of others- I haven't found much and haven't looked lately.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

Interesting take, and I think I see your point with that clarification of your view of stages of thought. I don't share that concept of the progression of ideas, nor do I feel the need to make the distinction between science and pre science.

I do think that much of what humans do is ascientific. But Jessica's examination of founders, esp via a structured interview, is not in this category.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

I'd say human language is the superset of artificial language and natural language. Though the artifical/natural labels are a poor fit.

Experience is a big factor, but I think there's a limit to the amount of language learning most 50 year olds can undergo, even in a decade. But luckily for us we agree young exposure to code is a good thing :)

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

No, though I don't think you're alone in drawing the line of science around deduction. I think of science as a cycle:

Phenomenon > observation > Induced hypothesis > Method choice > Deduction via metrics > Phenomenon ...

Starting at "a concrete basis for performing repeatable, independent experiments" is a skyhook. Scientists have a hand in generating that "basis" and it's called inductive logic.

I think we agree on the fact that the production of knowledge involves the testing of hypotheses but not whether the generation of hypotheses via observation of phenomena is part of science. Semantic, I suppose, but I think it's crucial to take the rudder so to speak by developing hypotheses deliberately.

eah13on My boys love 1986 computing

This is part of something I hope takes hold in CS education: ontogenous education. Ontogeny is the study of the development of organisms throughout their lifecycle. Technology develops in a way that often makes the present as dissimilar from its roots as a caterpillar and butterfly. So by starting at the beginning (or a beginning at least), rather than the present we give kids a full grasp of why things are the way they are rather than the millions of other ways they could be.

For many learners technology is a turn-off because it seems 'arbitrary'. It is, in the same sense that a biological organism or historical event is arbitrary. It's only with context that these things start to become intelligible. So ontogenous CS education is about giving a historical context to modern technology.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

False dichotomy. Mathematics is also a human language. Code and mathematics are more similar in many respects than code and Spanish. but they all share common features of being cultural, mutable, consensus-based, imperfect, and historically embedded.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics might be interesting to you. His description of calculation as a linguistic process should settle the issue if you buy it.

Edit: just found this related item on HN, a math prof examining the nature of a proof: http://profkeithdevlin.org/2014/11/24/what-is-a-proof-really...

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

I'd disagree with that. I think coding languages are in a very real sense human languages. They have less history, less literature, less culture, and different uses but they have history, literature, culture, and uses just like any language.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

+1 to back-testing the stats.

Edit: whoa, downvoters! This comment was about getting more information to inform productive discussion. Not sure who would disagree with that?

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

> this is not due to talent per se but the same people sufficiently obsessed with computer science to teach themselves at a young age also have the obsession to learn and master the more esoteric parts after they've become excellent programmers even though the practical utility is much less in practice

Agreed. I'd add this thought: code is a human language and like all languages fluency is most easily developed as a child but immersion and repetition can help adults develop it too.

eah13on What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders

This is a great story and project.

An apology (in the original sense) of Jessica's work for those who think that the experiences of these individuals don't matter: What I think people don't get about Jessica's interviews is that they're part of a scientific process of understanding what makes great founders and great companies. Many discredit qualitative, observational scientific data. But for new, rare, or poorly understood phenomena, observation is the only way to make scientific progress. In engineering the phenomena are often well understood, common, and within the discipline, familiar. In this case deductive logic, reasoning from known principles, is quite fruitful; but its success biases engineers against inductive reasoning. But for other subjects, such as what makes a great startup founder, or what makes a great female startup founder, the inductive method is much more fruitful.

This is not some anomaly: all sciences started with observation and the inductive method. These are the beginnings of insight, generating hypotheses to be tested. We're still quite early in our understanding of startups, and even more so in our understanding of female-founded startups, that this approach is not just warranted, it's the only way to make true progress.

Jessica is like the Jane Goodall of startup science. Even though she's studying individual founders she's ultimately helping us understand more about ourselves.

eah13on Bash 'shellshock' bug is wormable

Honest question: does this mean this vulnerability has been in bash for essentially its entire history and someone only discovered it now?

Seems quite likely that someone would have discovered it sooner, especially since it's so simple to exploit.

eah13on OhLife is shutting down

I found OhLife super helpful as a way of keeping a train of thought going. Am planning an open source side project like OhLife but that supports a few unobtrusive power features like topics. Email me at elliott @trinket io if you're interested / want to help.

A project like this should be an open source side project we build because we want it, not a startup.

eah13on iPhone 6 vs. Nikon DSLR

"Photographically speaking, having the camera with you is a real benefit." - Jay Maisel

Which one's always on you? If you, like some photographers I know, always have your camera around your neck, great. For everyone else, there's the iPhone.

Edit- added attribution