Ten Years at Google
neil.fraser.name
neil.fraser.name
Nice - https://developers.google.com/blockly/ no real fan of google, but the tools and code churned out by individuals there is pretty interesting. This I will play with.
You are right.
It looks horrible and cluttered and could be made better. Though visuals and design aside, the idea is sound. There is a real barrier b/w textual/visual in software. You don't see this in other physical disciplines like EE.
It would be interesting to have a better (easier to read, standardised etc.) version of these flow charts. Not impossible and possibly easier to trace, explain and see alternatives/improvements in design.
I'm not so sure "it could be made better".
That's not to say I think it's a lost cause: I think it works great for short, 5-10 line programs. Once programs grow larger it becomes very hard to reason with, like with most VPLs.
[0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] https://code.org [2] https://www.gethopscotch.com/ [3] https://www.tynker.com/ [4] http://stencyl.com/
Interesting comments. I'm not sure about the failure on larger programs. The idea of these visual languages is to allow different learning styles and a quicker way to absorb the program details into your head. The best understood programs are the ones we can hold in our heads.
Yet it isn't too hard a visual problem to show complex situations graphically. You do this with scale. EEs manage to show complex logic in circuit diagrams (and other diagrams for states) so I see no reason why more complex programs cannot be shown graphically. (cf: background in technical graphics/cartography/gis/programming).
The biggest limitation is the way programmers think. They convert textual code and parse it in their head. Aside from logic diagrams, flow charts (and others) I don't think 4GL programs have really taken off because the source code is the most efficient way to write, read and show software.
When it comes to graphics programmers don't natively grok graphics as they do text and shun such tools. I've noticed that I have to switch modes of thinking text when programming, then graphical for other things. It's a hard thing to do and the precision of programming breaks my ability to visualise and draw.
The scaling idea is simple. You have blocks of code that are represented as Blocky. As you look at more aspects of the program, you scale out and see a smaller scale view of the code represented visually. You do this with maps all the time. The complexity of the data is orders of magnitudes of the landscape is more complex with respect to software. You zoom in and out of the landscape as needed to understand, measure or picture the lay of the land.
The key thing I get from this is the union of primarily textual programmers to people wishing to visually understand has a shallow overlap.
Unfortunately, it seems like VPLs only work well for well-defined domains (say, a VPL for shaders, a VPL for compositing, a VPL for EE, a VPL for business logic)
Once you try to go general, and add "zooming in" and "zooming out" mappings, the number of ways that people would prefer to visualize each becomes exponentially more complex to display/interact with; so much so that then simply using text seems like a general-enough solution.
I'm still hopeful that a general purpose VPL could exist and work for 'real' programs, but so far my search has come up empty.
A good reference list to look at for existing VPLs:
http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...
Thanks for this insight. Agree with "text is good-enough". The link is like a list of approaches not to take. IFTTT, minecraft and openmusic appear to do the job.
The problem I'm thinking of is creating geometry using a combination of GUI manipulation -> geometry ->code to allow tweaking for n00bs, straight code -> geometry with GUI manipulation. These examples really help.
I missed/mis-understood this bit. I think of the visual side as another slice of how code is constructed/works/understood. I've limited experience of VCL (windstorms) and thought it was terribly clunky, got out an editor and used text.
Visual coding has a place in geometric construction. This has to do with feedback maybe less so on understanding code.
From the about page: One of the limitations of Scratch as a language for computer science education is that its lists are not first class, so you can’t have a list of lists. Making lists first class is enough of an extension to Scratch to allow the creation of any other data structures (trees, heaps, hash tables, dictionaries, and so on) in user-defined Snap! code, implemented as lists of lists. via https://snap.berkeley.edu/about.html
Take even the smallest snippet:
while (Count <= 3) {
To you or me, this is pretty obvious. I've had kids ask me questions I'd never have thought of because I know this stuff already:
* What do the parentheses mean? * What is Count, is it a Javascript thing? * Is Count being set to 3? (<= looks like an arrow, not necessarily less than or equal to) * What is that squiggle? (meaning the '{') * Is this a program?
I'm with you, the Blockly stuff is hardly legible to me. But to kids learning this for the first time, I can tell you from first hand experience the color/shape/block aspect makes a huge difference.
A simple for-loop can be complicated.
First, they need to understand that a for-loop instantiates a variable (i). Then they need to understand that the next step is a limit: i < something. And then they need to understand that i++ means increment i every time that the below code is run.
Nevermind that it makes more sense to go: i = 0, i = I + 1, i < something, that's how it works.
Of course if they don't get that, they may not be cut out for programming. But its far from intuitive.
"""The CS teacher was excited and promised to teach Blockly the next day. But there was another issue compromising the class. Due to a lack of funds, the school could not afford two CS teachers, so half the school was unable to take CS. I asked what a teacher's salary was. $100 per month. So I went to an ATM and bought them a second teacher for the next year."""
Sad and awesome at the same time.
My first real paying gig was for a local Pennsylvania company who distributed pBasic boards and merkur sets. They used an open source Perl IDE that allowed 3-5 graders to program the bot visually.
I didn't know Perl and was still in high school, but was able to make some great contributions (to the company version). Taught me how to manage very small amounts of memory. I owe the original author a thanks for making such a solidly coded tool.
The tool may have come from parallax software.
I think he's the most responsive maintainer I've ever come across!
Google will keep anyone talented that's 'producing stuff', they have massive surpluses of cash.
I think a lot of people would love to work at Google for a long time so long as they fit in the culture. Who wouldn't want to work on fun stuff that the word is using?
And a high, stable income is the next most valuable thing after stock options in a high flying company :)
What are the alternatives? A startup wherein you will likely lose your job? Oracle? Cisco? Probably not nearly as interesting.
Alt career choice? Might cut their salary in half ...
Maybe a different way to frame it: why would they leave?
I wouldn't even like to work at Google, but I have no trouble understanding why people would park there for a long while :)
Kudos to them for providing a place for so many talented folks to create cool things.
It's awesome that Neil did something he's proud of and shared it on his personal blog. Good for him.
I wonder if anyone has a favourite article that reflects on how they and Google changed over the ten years that they were there?
(whichever question makes more sense)
50.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04.