
Show HN: An Easy Programming Language – Built with WebAssembly - chkas
https://easyprog.online
======
Vanderson
The syntax/formatting reminds me of Lingo [0]. But also Logo and Basic.

One of the things I really liked about coding in Lingo (in Director [1]) was
the sparse syntax but the code auto-highlighted as you typed. (not common back
then) But also auto indented as you typed. It was really easy and fast to
program with.

The graphics code reminded me of "hi-res" graphics programming on the Apple
computer. Some nostalgia there.

This brings me around to how magical it felt to program things for the first
time as a kid, and how there doesn't seem to be an environment for this kind
of excitement or discovery anymore.

Maybe just a change of times, like how the first planes and auto-mobiles were
created by hobbyists, but those times are mostly gone.

Any notion on what a language like this would be good for? I get the
impression maybe similar to my own nostalgia...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_\(programming_language\))

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Director](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Director)

~~~
heyoni
How is programming less magical today than it was in the past? if anything
it’s far more fulfilling now considering how much more one can accomplish.

~~~
ModernMech
In the past you fired up an editor and the tools were built in and ready to
use. Im thinking back to BASIC. Today you have to download and understand a
stack of tools and languages before you get anything printing on the screen.

~~~
hutzlibu
open devtools in your browser. (f12 in chrome)

type:

console.log ("hello world")

pretty simple

~~~
ModernMech
Do people actually use devtools to write code?

~~~
projectramo
To be fair, s/he was responding to "Today you have to download and understand
a stack of tools and languages before you get anything printing on the
screen."

It is true that people don't generally ship code written in devtools, but then
most of the programs shipped on the Commodore 64 were not written in basic.
(Unless you count hundreds of peeks and pokes as basic.)

I do miss the immediacy of the programming experience, but I also think the
correct modern day analog of that is the browser.

~~~
ModernMech
> but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser.

The browser is exactly what I had in mind when I said "you have to learn a
stack of languages". Sure, okay, console.log() gets you "hello world", but so
does "echo" so maybe I placed the bar too low. Still, getting into the modern
web experience requires you to learn HTML + CSS + Javascript and how they
relate and interop.

Fast forward a little bit from the BASIC days to Visual Basic. Back then you
could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed
one language and one environment. I don't see how the browser world is easier
or more approachable than that.

~~~
hutzlibu
Well," Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a
window, and needed one language and one environment. " you still had to learn
the different gui frameworks and how they work.

Also, if you want, you can write GUI in the browser without html/css, with the
canvas element. There are frameworks for that, not sure how mature they are,
though.

~~~
ModernMech
> you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work.

No you didn't, it was built into the VB editor; you just dragged and dropped
elements into a window frame, then edited callback functions. You didn't have
to leave VB at all or learn any other language or framework.

~~~
hutzlibu
Ah ok, I never used VB. I experienced that with Delphi ... and much more
elaborate with Adobes Flex(or more beautiful, but less clean, with Flash),
which is pretty dead nowdays unfortunately and I have not found a replacement.
Any tool which tried to do this for HTML has been horrible so far.

------
amenghra

      a = 11
      if a = 10
    

Great way to set someone up for failure when they switch to any C-like
language!

I personally have experienced people finding it easier to grasp a construct
such as _a := 1_ or _let a = 1_. The way most programming languages assign
values to variables conflicts with the notion of equations, which is familiar
to a lot of people by the time they learn to write programs.

~~~
musicale
Perhaps it's C that is weird for confusingly allowing you to assign within a
logical expression. At least clang (and possibly other compilers) warn you
because they assume you meant to write '=='.

(Dartmouth BASIC required a LET keyword, Kemeny and Kurtz being mathematicians
after all. Bill Gates might have made it optional in Microsoft BASIC to save
typing and possibly one byte of memory.)

I sort of miss Smalltalk's left-arrow though.

------
AnaniasAnanas
All I see is "Loading ..." and when looking at the console I see things like
"Content Security Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a
resource at
[https://easyprog.online/games/easyw.js](https://easyprog.online/games/easyw.js)
(“worker-src”).".

------
desireco42
I like it, it is very well made and organized. I jumped to Monte Carlo methods
and examples clearly explained what it was. I think this is great layout for
teaching. Thank you for making it.

------
mrspeaker
I really like this. Could you make the page load with the first demo code pre-
loaded? I sat there looking at the code and hitting "run", checking the
browser console to see if there was any error. Then I realised I had to press
"load" first and then "run".

Also, one bit of criticism: if it's not too late I'd also re-think the name.
"Easyprog" is going to make any newbies really frustrated when they can't
figure something out and the site is just mocking them: "lol, you can't figure
it out and it's so EASY!".

Other than that, I think this is a great project - really well done, and it
has a lot of potential to me really great learning tool.

~~~
chkas
> if it's not too late I'd also re-think the name

I am also not yet satisfied with the name - so if you had a suggestion ...

------
codetrotter
Pretty cool! Is the source on GitHub? If not, do you plan to put it there
under an open source license?

~~~
chkas
Not yet - I intend it when it reaches a certain spread - I don't want anyone
to change that a little and then claim it as his work.

~~~
ModernMech
This is literally not a concern. There's a very large community of hobbyist
programming language designers and I've never heard an instance of someone
poaching another's language and running with it as their own.

~~~
maxhallinan
Where does this community of hobbyist language designers gather online?

~~~
ModernMech
/r/programminglanguages (17.5k subscribers) is a good start. They recently
launched a directory of projects (50+) the group is working on:
[https://www.proglangdesign.net](https://www.proglangdesign.net) which also
links to their IRC and discord servers.

Also there's [https://futureofcoding.org](https://futureofcoding.org) which
has a growing community of language and tool designers focused on live-coding
languages. There's a good number of projects being developed by members there.

~~~
maxhallinan
Thanks!

------
mwexler
Evokes logo/pilot with turtle graphics;
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PILOT) and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_\(programming_language\))
which were both great fun back in the day...

