Snap: A visual drag-and-drop programming language | Hacker News Reader

Snap: A visual drag-and-drop programming language

byob.berkeley.edu

78 pointsdanboarder17 comments

Yes! Way back, Snap was the first browser-compatible[1] block-based coding environment I came across[2], and it got me really excited about the things teaching programming on internet-connected touch devices could make possible.

For those interested, a couple of other neat projects with a similar focus on visual programming in the browser—

Blockly https://developers.google.com/blockly/ — fantastic subtle UI affordances for snapping, deletion, and a neat mostly-block-world-only way of manipulating everything (including defining new procedures). Growing set of apps out there which consume this library.

Droplet https://github.com/dabbler0/droplet — awesome animated transition from blocks to text, and back again. Extremely flexible on the "what arbitrary code segment can constitute a draggable block" side, has drag-to-multi-select and undo support. Uses ACE on the text side of things

[1] having previously used Scratch and Etoys in a handful of rural schools on XO laptops

[2] hey... I shared this page 804 days ago, and only 2 upvotes! Before its time, or my crappy headline?

> [2] hey... I shared this page 804 days ago, and only 2 upvotes! Before its time, or my crappy headline?

It depends on who is watching the new queue and how much competition there is; e.g. this caught on while America was sleeping when overall activity is kind of slow.

SNAP! considers itself as Scheme disguised as Scratch and rightfully so.

We had our Intro to CS class with SNAP, which I hated at the beginning, but towards the end, the professor used it to explain fundamental CS topics (sorting, data structures, parallelism) that was approachable by all. For the class projects, people that had no prior exposure to programming made some amazing stuffs with it.

This is indeed very nice. Having Lists and Procedures really helps teach children about computer programming. Using Scratch had this as quite a challenge.

I was able to download the github repo and run it locally. I was wondering how we can save projects on the disk and run them.

This would be a big help when schools don't have internet access.

I'm confused - this looks and sounds like Phratch but they don't mention Pratch at all (although hint towards it by mentioning BYOB (Build You Own Blocks) which is something that Phratch had).

EDIT: My bad, BYOB seems to be separate to Phratch, and they (Phratch) added it to Scratch to create Phratch. http://www.phratch.com/ - Snap is a separate in-browser implementation. I think I'm less confused now...

Yes it is based on Scratch but extended with more features, including first class lists, first class procedures, and continuations.

They seem to have began overhauling Scratch's visual design in Snap (background is flatter, more muted, but the blocks stay the same). I like it, and hope they can eventually get around to redoing the block visual design as well (right now, the mix of the two designs is a bit jarring).

Too bad that for some reason in my browser (Chromium version 43.0.2357.65 (64-bit) on Arch Linux), HiDPI setup (which was added to Chromium very recently), the fonts look extremely blurry, giving me the irresistible urge to squeeze my eyelids to get things in focus. I experience no such blurriness with other web apps (whether using plain HTML/CSS, SVG, HTML5 Canvas, etc.).

Yeah...it's a known issue, but a solution is apparently in the works? (low priority though.)

This is great =). If you want to have some fun with another Scratch derivative, play this (was in HN a while ago) https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze/

Minor anoyance on the Snap website: The tool-tips for the top bar buttons do not show (at least not in chrome 43).

That URL with the slash at the end returned a 404. https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze works.

This is cool but I always wish it wasn't just Logo. People get bored with Logo fairly quickly in my experience.

Why is it 'just Logo'? Because it's got turtle commands?

They're using this to teach an interdisciplinary computing course at my university. I haven't played with it enough to form my own opinion on it, but some of the academic staff here are pretty sceptical.

Oh, that's interesting, I'm curious about about the academic scepticism, can you tell more about the university and the issues? Thanks!

It was more faculty politicking than anything else. I'm not too familiar with all the details, but basically - the course was initially proposed as an introduction to "computational thinking" primarily aimed at non-CS majors. Some of the faculty though seemed to want to transform it into the mainline introduction to programming course and potentially replace our existing intro to programming course (which is taught in Haskell).

The current intro to programming lecturer is pretty firmly of the belief that GUI-based languages like Snap which are in many ways quite restrictive just aren't appropriate for teaching CS majors who'll be progressing to C and other languages in their 2nd year. Looks like he's winning the debate at the moment and there aren't any current plans to change his course at least for the next couple of years.

Unreal Engine 4's blueprints are a great example of visual programming.

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