What we've learned from a year of live coding

[seanmcdirmid]

It seems they make the same mistake as the Khan Academy computer science editor [1] does. Bret says something about it in his learnable programming [2] post:

> The programming environment exhibits the same ruthless abbreviation as this hypothetical cooking show. We see code on the left and a result on the right, but it's the steps in between which matter most. The computer traces a path through the code, looping around loops and calling into functions, updating variables and incrementally building up the output. We see none of this.

I mean, this is a nice start, but we still have lots of work to do before we really understand what we are doing in this area.

[1] http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/

[2] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

[poezn]

That's right, and I hope that's where both Tributary and programming in general are headed. However, saying that they "make the same mistake" seems odd. Progress can happen incrementally, and sometimes you have to see what works and what not. It's almost as if you have to prototype your idea and see real results immediately, very similar to the goals of learnable programming.

[lelandbatey]

Seriously, the ability to "step through" a program is HUGELY helpful for learning what programming does. I remember learning the beginnings of programming in Visual Basic for Applications inside Excel 2003. The best feature was the ability to "walk through" the program, with a yellow line highlighting the current code being executed and a window that showed all the variables and their outputs in a highly readable format. Those two things really helped me as a kid learn what programming looked like.

[shurcooL]

It is both a very nice start, and there is definitely lots of room for improvement.

I'm working in this very area too.

One other thing I can add is that, IMO, it's very valuable to be able to easily execute a subset of the entire program (the tool should do everything it can to make the process easy, you just supply the necessary inputs).

[ptvan]

i'm wondering if we can first explictly state the objective by which this is being judged, mistakes or successes assigned

[ptvan]

as a designer (not a coder as much), tributary helps me realize my concepts quicker by helping with some of the technical stuff like automagically linking csv and json files. my go-to workflow is finding a d3.js example (e.g. from bostock's blocks http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ ) that has some components in common with what i want to accomplish, and then hacking/repurposing it to get what i need. sharing my tributary inlets makes it super easy to get feedback on what im doing wrong, and changing variables with sliders is now difficult to live without.

being able to change the parameters of animations/simulations and see the results in real time is pretty incredible.

[prezjordan]

Very cool, reminds me of the interactive widget used in the Khan Academy CS program [1]. I believe John Resig [2] developed it.

[1]: http://khanacademy.org/cs

[2]: https://github.com/Khan/canvas-editor

[yesimahuman]

Wow, I just played with the basic example, and being able to "slide" an integer in my code and watch the visualization update in realtime is pretty interesting! Looking forward to playing with this, nice work.

[poezn]

This is pretty amazing. Granted, I'm friends with the authors (@enjalot, @mrejfox), but Tributary has easily become one of my most used tools on a daily basis.

[timtamboy63]

Definitely cool, but must the page be so ugly?

[boggzPit]

This is pretty subjective, or? I personally find it very good. You should learn to give feedback and not complain.

[ejfox]

What would you improve? Always looking for useful feedback!

Cheers