Just want to say I really enjoyed your chapter on “Visuals and Blocked Languages”.
My career got started programming Flash. Mostly because I loved the visuals and wanted to code it. Even though there is scratch, and other block based languages it seems text is still the king.
Text as you’ve identified is not the most new comer friendly.
I still think the holy grail of visual programming is still to come. Most of coding is describing abstract syntax trees. A nice visual tree/graph manipulation editor has yet to be invented. Being able to have a hybrid text and visual seems like a good place to be.
I’ve spent many years thinking and obsessed about this concept. Especially around the ideas of code completion/intellisense.
What are your opinions on how kids in a decade will code?
I think we'll find that there are a dozen different _reasons_ kids will need/want to code, and each of those will lead to dramatically different environments and ways. For instance, do kids need intellisense? Yes, if they're trying to accomplish a particular application goal, whereas maybe it's a bad idea if they're still learning the basics of programming.
Comments
Just want to say I really enjoyed your chapter on “Visuals and Blocked Languages”.
My career got started programming Flash. Mostly because I loved the visuals and wanted to code it. Even though there is scratch, and other block based languages it seems text is still the king.
Text as you’ve identified is not the most new comer friendly.
I still think the holy grail of visual programming is still to come. Most of coding is describing abstract syntax trees. A nice visual tree/graph manipulation editor has yet to be invented. Being able to have a hybrid text and visual seems like a good place to be.
I’ve spent many years thinking and obsessed about this concept. Especially around the ideas of code completion/intellisense.
What are your opinions on how kids in a decade will code?
I think we'll find that there are a dozen different _reasons_ kids will need/want to code, and each of those will lead to dramatically different environments and ways. For instance, do kids need intellisense? Yes, if they're trying to accomplish a particular application goal, whereas maybe it's a bad idea if they're still learning the basics of programming.