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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

I just discovered this amazing classic demo by Margaret Minsky from Atari Cambridge Research Labs, demonstrating a gestural programming system with a button box for programming with a pressure sensitive touch screen, developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M

This is one of many amazing videos from Cynthia Solomon's treasure trove of youtube uploads.

https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos

If you act now, you can be the 32nd person to watch this video of Seymour Papert demonstrate the Logo Turtle! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g

Or be the 39th person to watch this video of Seymour Papert explaining how giraffes sleep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM

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John Carmack has mentioned that he uses a visual Lisp environment on iPad. Scheme-based, iirc.

It's somewhere in here, I think (but alas I'm not up to listening again through half an hour of the old lady voice): https://youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A

I feel like marrying Lisp's meta-programmable DSLs to an easy visual environment is the ultimate cosmic dream of 'domain-centered' programming and customization for non-coders―but it also seems to me that Lisp is rather text-based, trading a readymade set of operations picked in the interface for infinite extendability through text. So I'm not sure if a visual Lisp is any convenient to use.

Also, for me the immediate downside of the Lisp environment in question is that it's only available for iPad.

He uses Racket.

I'd say Lisp is S-Expression based, and it's easier to make both text and graphical interface to S-Expressions than to the syntax of typical text based languages.

By Apple's decree and app store policy, any programming language on the iPad that isn't purely based on the JavaScript interpreter in the web browser isn't allowed to download and run executable code, much to the frustration of Alan Kay, who is weary of people comparing the iPad to the Dynabook without acknowledging that Apple left out and prohibited his most important idea on purpose: user programmability.

If Carmack's visual Lisp is implemented as an iOS app with locally running native code, and not purely in JavaScript running in the web browser, then he has to build it himself in XCode on his own Mac for his own use with his own Apple developer certificates, and he isn't allowed to distribute it on the app store.

If you can implement your language purely in JavaScript, like Snap! or the web version of Scratch 3.0, then it'll run everywhere, and isn't an iPad app, just a web app, so it's not bound by the restrictions of Apple's app store. That's the way to go if you can.

https://snap.berkeley.edu/

This is amazing, thanks for sharing! do you know what year are these videos from? I couldn't find any reference.

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