Set showdead=true and you can see his fanatical arguments in defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, and attacks on other people who disagreed with him, which rightly got his multiple comments flagged dead.
His evidence-free Nazi-salute-defending arguments were in such bad faith, ignoring and refusing to address other people's valid counter arguments, the exact same way he is now ignoring and refusing to engage with mine, and sealioning questions whose very premises so wrong they don't deserve the answers I gave him anyway, that his old dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated, since they're a distraction from the useful things I actually linked to. The only thing his comments prove is that he's not arguing in good faith, and can only dispense drive-by evidence-free attacks.
You can easily find them yourself if you really don't believe me, but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?
I believe your time would be much better spent reading the links I already provided than his Musk cheerleading and oligarch water carrying and Nazi salute whitewashing. But if you really care about his arguments, why don't you ask him now to explain what he said about Musk, privately? Or doesn't he publish under his own name with his own email address so you can ask him, like I do?
I'm more than happy to answer your personal email about my own arguments and projects, and continue this discussion in private: don@donhopkins.com
His own ungrounded vitriolic words attacking Jens Mönig's and Brian Harvey's and Seymour Papert's life work like "it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world" and "like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark" are dismissive, insulting, and provably wrong.
So I posted several links and evidence refuting him and defending my friends. Yet then he repeated the same pattern as his full throated defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, by ignoring all the evidence, and reiterating his unsubstantiated false accusations, without providing any objective evidence or coherent arguments or even any citations himself.
If you'd like to learn about cool free open source educational projects, please look at the many links I already posted, and what I posted to the Logo discussion. At least spend as much time on those interesting relevent links as you already have wasted reading his uninteresing irrelevent posting history, please.
He didn't post any links or evidence or even coherent arguments to support his mistaken and aggressive accusations, while I refuted "this is BS" by linking to and quoting the Wikipedia page about Seymour Papert's Constructionist Education philosophy, "just a toy" by naming and linking to many Snap! projects and demos, and "no connection to the real world" by citing several physical real world connections like TurtleStitch.
Yet he dismissed and ignored all of that, and questioned the motives of sincere professional educators and developers of free open source software as merely and illegitimately promoting Snap!, because he isn't arguing in good faith, just attacking, and he didn't bother looking at any of the links, so he still doesn't know what he's talking about.
If reading his oligarch-syncophantic posting history (which I was trying to save you from by identifying where he's actually coming from) isn't interesting enough for you, and you still thirst to learn about cool projects, then please look at the links I already posted, read my other recent posts about Logo, and check out some of the other educational projects I've been developing over several decades, which were deeply inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionism, that I've written a lot about.
But if like him you're so offput and triggered by the very mention of diversity, constructionist education, free speech for anyone but Musk, and criticism of an unloving parent so terrible and unaccepting that he publically and vitriolically disparages, abuses, and disowns his own trans daughter in front of millions of people that you have to leap to his defense, then there's nothing I can do for you, sir.
But I certainly hope you're not like that, so here are some links in good faith:
Gary Drescher's Schema Mechanism skill from "Made Up Minds" (based on his PhD thesis and book about how children learn, with his advisor Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab):
Don't worry, I didn't spend much time digging through comment history. Thanks for the links; I'm about to have to leave my computer and do something else for several hours, so I can't look at them right now. But since you replied to one of my comments it'll be easy to find them again via the "threads" link, so I'll look at them later when I'm back at the computer. (And I did look at the first one; Logo Adventure is exactly the kind of thing I love to come across, so thanks for that!)
I'm not sure what caused him to lash out at me like that, I thought I was being pretty reasonable (albeit very casual with terms like BS), I even made sure to say multiple times that it was my opinions and views, and that maybe I just don't "get it".
I understand that some consider Elon a Nazi but I don't consider that a common belief, so I don't know why I'd need to support that belief in order to talk about this Snap language and others, like Scratch.
I don't love graphical programming environments like this and Scratch and I can't quite put my finger on why I find them so unattractive.
> A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely cannot learn software engineering from this.
And you then showed off some embroidery stuff and things that I explained that in my own opinion, are not connected to real world software engineering/programming, and seem to serve Snap rather than things that you'd actually use in the field.
That's my opinion and I'm allowed to have my own. Otherwise all I could say is that you're right and its awesome. Right?
And here you are attacking me with things like:
"but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?"
"dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated"
Because apparently I'm not allowed to have my own opinions of blocky visual programming languages. A bit fascist isn't it?
Anyhow
"I attended Snap!Con in Barcelona, played around with TurtleStitch myself, and still have and cherish the cool textile artifacts (and also cool friends) I made.
And the TurtleStitch presentation included live streaming video of students of diverse genders and cultures and ages enthusiastically showing off and talking about the beautiful physical objects they designed, programmed, made, presented to their parents and the conference, and are rightfully proud of, and discuss what they learned from the experience."
Okay, how does this disprove my point that its more about making machined embroidery accessible vs. learning CS concepts?
And who would attend Snap!Con unless they were part of that community working on the ecosystem or deeply involved with it?
You're projecting that I'm arguing in bad faith, but clearly that's you here, I can't really engage with you properly when your replies are full of things like:
"
In a nutshell or TL;DR for someone unwilling to put in the time and effort to learn or even consider evidence, and who talks about promoting curiosity but is incurious yourself, and who performatively refuses to recognize an obvious Nazi salute and feels compelled to repeatedly defend and praise Elon Musk after he does it twice in a row on international television: it's all about Constructionist Education, not promoting or showing off a product, or selling computer controlled embroidery machines, Arduinos, and robots, or even a cynical huckster perennially promising full self driving cars and trips to Mars."
I visited all the links you provided and still arrived in the same conclusion.
and you're saying I'm incurious. Can you just stop lying and spreading lies about me? And when have I praised Musk?
If you're so emotionally attached to this 'language' that you feel the need to dig up "dirt" on me from my post history and spread lies and tell others that I'm some kind of fascist, maybe you should reevaluate your life choices. I wouldn't get this mad over someone criticizing Go or Rust etc.
And it proves that you're unable to take criticism of your language since you're convinced that no matter what, you're right and that with you posting some conference talk links, others should become convinced that it's a super relevant language.
And with regards to Constructionism, from my understanding, the main point seems to be to use existing knowledge to acquire more knowledge, CS/programming in this case.
From the Wikipedia page:
"The following five strategies make problem-based learning more effective:
1. The learning activities should be related to a larger task. The larger task is important because it allows students to see that the activities can be applied to many aspects of life and, as a result, students are more likely to find the activities they are doing useful."
This is exactly my criticism. With Snap / etc. the larger task is just a demo or something inside Snap. maybe controlling some robot, okay.
But it's not something you'd see in the real world, it can't be "applied to many aspects of life" in the context of CS, it's mostly constrained to Snap and its environment.
My belief is that learning is done best when there is a connection to something real, not just a simulation or an exercise. With Snap, it inevitably is kind of just a demo. Whereas with real languages you can get close to how things are done for real, which serve as a motivator and invoke curiosity.
Again, if it's your opinion that Snap is successful and that's why people are using it to learn to code, then that's fine. I haven't seen that happen yet and I believe there are reasons as to why I haven't seen that happen.
And since I'm here in good faith (unlike you) I will provide links to my Nazi comments as per your accusations:
btw, I have literally criticized the wealth of Musk in HN before and how it's unsustainable, same with the AI datacenter buildout and financial consolidation that's happening right now.
Considering your vast experience and knowledge, I find your conduct pretty embarrassing here.
Comments
Set showdead=true and you can see his fanatical arguments in defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, and attacks on other people who disagreed with him, which rightly got his multiple comments flagged dead.
His evidence-free Nazi-salute-defending arguments were in such bad faith, ignoring and refusing to address other people's valid counter arguments, the exact same way he is now ignoring and refusing to engage with mine, and sealioning questions whose very premises so wrong they don't deserve the answers I gave him anyway, that his old dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated, since they're a distraction from the useful things I actually linked to. The only thing his comments prove is that he's not arguing in good faith, and can only dispense drive-by evidence-free attacks.
You can easily find them yourself if you really don't believe me, but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?
I believe your time would be much better spent reading the links I already provided than his Musk cheerleading and oligarch water carrying and Nazi salute whitewashing. But if you really care about his arguments, why don't you ask him now to explain what he said about Musk, privately? Or doesn't he publish under his own name with his own email address so you can ask him, like I do?
I'm more than happy to answer your personal email about my own arguments and projects, and continue this discussion in private: don@donhopkins.com
His own ungrounded vitriolic words attacking Jens Mönig's and Brian Harvey's and Seymour Papert's life work like "it's because this is BS and just a toy, it's got no connection to the real world" and "like almost as if the ecosystem simply serves to show off Snap and thus misses the mark" are dismissive, insulting, and provably wrong.
So I posted several links and evidence refuting him and defending my friends. Yet then he repeated the same pattern as his full throated defense of Musk's Nazi salutes, by ignoring all the evidence, and reiterating his unsubstantiated false accusations, without providing any objective evidence or coherent arguments or even any citations himself.
If you'd like to learn about cool free open source educational projects, please look at the many links I already posted, and what I posted to the Logo discussion. At least spend as much time on those interesting relevent links as you already have wasted reading his uninteresing irrelevent posting history, please.
He didn't post any links or evidence or even coherent arguments to support his mistaken and aggressive accusations, while I refuted "this is BS" by linking to and quoting the Wikipedia page about Seymour Papert's Constructionist Education philosophy, "just a toy" by naming and linking to many Snap! projects and demos, and "no connection to the real world" by citing several physical real world connections like TurtleStitch.
Yet he dismissed and ignored all of that, and questioned the motives of sincere professional educators and developers of free open source software as merely and illegitimately promoting Snap!, because he isn't arguing in good faith, just attacking, and he didn't bother looking at any of the links, so he still doesn't know what he's talking about.
If reading his oligarch-syncophantic posting history (which I was trying to save you from by identifying where he's actually coming from) isn't interesting enough for you, and you still thirst to learn about cool projects, then please look at the links I already posted, read my other recent posts about Logo, and check out some of the other educational projects I've been developing over several decades, which were deeply inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionism, that I've written a lot about.
But if like him you're so offput and triggered by the very mention of diversity, constructionist education, free speech for anyone but Musk, and criticism of an unloving parent so terrible and unaccepting that he publically and vitriolically disparages, abuses, and disowns his own trans daughter in front of millions of people that you have to leap to his defense, then there's nothing I can do for you, sir.
But I certainly hope you're not like that, so here are some links in good faith:
Logo Adventure for C64 Terrapin Logo:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapi...
Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
This is Micropolis (open source SimCity) in WebAssembly:
https://micropolisweb.com/
This is The Sims 1 character animation system (which I original wrote in C++ 30 years ago) rewritten in TypeScript and WebGL:
https://vitamoo.space/
Micropolis and other open source code, documentation, and designs for new educational software:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/
MOOLLM Constructionism skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/constru...
MOOLLM Adventure skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adventu...
Adventure Compiler:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...
Gary Drescher's Schema Mechanism skill from "Made Up Minds" (based on his PhD thesis and book about how children learn, with his advisor Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab):
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/schema-...
MOOLLM Play Learn Lift skill:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/play-le...
Don't worry, I didn't spend much time digging through comment history. Thanks for the links; I'm about to have to leave my computer and do something else for several hours, so I can't look at them right now. But since you replied to one of my comments it'll be easy to find them again via the "threads" link, so I'll look at them later when I'm back at the computer. (And I did look at the first one; Logo Adventure is exactly the kind of thing I love to come across, so thanks for that!)
I'm not sure what caused him to lash out at me like that, I thought I was being pretty reasonable (albeit very casual with terms like BS), I even made sure to say multiple times that it was my opinions and views, and that maybe I just don't "get it".
Here's my reply with links to my past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49671123
I understand that some consider Elon a Nazi but I don't consider that a common belief, so I don't know why I'd need to support that belief in order to talk about this Snap language and others, like Scratch.
You need to cool down.
I replied to this comment:
And you then showed off some embroidery stuff and things that I explained that in my own opinion, are not connected to real world software engineering/programming, and seem to serve Snap rather than things that you'd actually use in the field.
That's my opinion and I'm allowed to have my own. Otherwise all I could say is that you're right and its awesome. Right?
And here you are attacking me with things like:
"but it's a waste of your time, because his comments have no value. Have you looked at any of those valuable links I did post yet, or did you just get stuck in the worthless rabbithole of his posting history?"
"dead boot licking comments don't deserved to be linked or repeated"
Because apparently I'm not allowed to have my own opinions of blocky visual programming languages. A bit fascist isn't it?
Anyhow
"I attended Snap!Con in Barcelona, played around with TurtleStitch myself, and still have and cherish the cool textile artifacts (and also cool friends) I made.
And the TurtleStitch presentation included live streaming video of students of diverse genders and cultures and ages enthusiastically showing off and talking about the beautiful physical objects they designed, programmed, made, presented to their parents and the conference, and are rightfully proud of, and discuss what they learned from the experience."
Okay, how does this disprove my point that its more about making machined embroidery accessible vs. learning CS concepts?
And who would attend Snap!Con unless they were part of that community working on the ecosystem or deeply involved with it?
You're projecting that I'm arguing in bad faith, but clearly that's you here, I can't really engage with you properly when your replies are full of things like:
" In a nutshell or TL;DR for someone unwilling to put in the time and effort to learn or even consider evidence, and who talks about promoting curiosity but is incurious yourself, and who performatively refuses to recognize an obvious Nazi salute and feels compelled to repeatedly defend and praise Elon Musk after he does it twice in a row on international television: it's all about Constructionist Education, not promoting or showing off a product, or selling computer controlled embroidery machines, Arduinos, and robots, or even a cynical huckster perennially promising full self driving cars and trips to Mars."
I visited all the links you provided and still arrived in the same conclusion.
and you're saying I'm incurious. Can you just stop lying and spreading lies about me? And when have I praised Musk?
If you're so emotionally attached to this 'language' that you feel the need to dig up "dirt" on me from my post history and spread lies and tell others that I'm some kind of fascist, maybe you should reevaluate your life choices. I wouldn't get this mad over someone criticizing Go or Rust etc.
And it proves that you're unable to take criticism of your language since you're convinced that no matter what, you're right and that with you posting some conference talk links, others should become convinced that it's a super relevant language.
And with regards to Constructionism, from my understanding, the main point seems to be to use existing knowledge to acquire more knowledge, CS/programming in this case.
From the Wikipedia page:
"The following five strategies make problem-based learning more effective:
1. The learning activities should be related to a larger task. The larger task is important because it allows students to see that the activities can be applied to many aspects of life and, as a result, students are more likely to find the activities they are doing useful."
This is exactly my criticism. With Snap / etc. the larger task is just a demo or something inside Snap. maybe controlling some robot, okay.
But it's not something you'd see in the real world, it can't be "applied to many aspects of life" in the context of CS, it's mostly constrained to Snap and its environment.
My belief is that learning is done best when there is a connection to something real, not just a simulation or an exercise. With Snap, it inevitably is kind of just a demo. Whereas with real languages you can get close to how things are done for real, which serve as a motivator and invoke curiosity.
Again, if it's your opinion that Snap is successful and that's why people are using it to learn to code, then that's fine. I haven't seen that happen yet and I believe there are reasons as to why I haven't seen that happen.
And since I'm here in good faith (unlike you) I will provide links to my Nazi comments as per your accusations:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589879 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590610 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589966
btw, I have literally criticized the wealth of Musk in HN before and how it's unsustainable, same with the AI datacenter buildout and financial consolidation that's happening right now.
Considering your vast experience and knowledge, I find your conduct pretty embarrassing here.