
What we've learned from a year of live coding - ejfox
http://ejfox.github.com/happybirthdaytributary/
======
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/>

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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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
You are right of course; the problem is that even though there have been
people working on this problem since 2003, no one has communicated very well
about the results outside of a few academic circles.

Hancock solves this problem with live text in Flogo II, but all we know about
it is from his dissertation (<http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf>). I
observed the same phenomena when I did my Sueperglue work back in 2007
([http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1793...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=179365)),
but I never really bothered to follow up until now (with inspiration from
Bret's work, of course).

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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.

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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>

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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.

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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.

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timtamboy63
Definitely cool, but must the page be so ugly?

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ejfox
What would you improve? Always looking for useful feedback!

Cheers

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nawitus
I'm not the op, but I dislike the font and the colorful background (header).

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ejfox
Makes sense to me. Lightened up the background a bit- any better?
[https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc189...](https://github.com/ejfox/happybirthdaytributary/commit/dc18978ba698078c030868d2ce69c3d9004c668d?diff-0=1-48)

~~~
nawitus
That's better, but I would probably still extend the solid-color background to
the top of the page, so the background doesn't clash with the text at all.

