

Colorful programs for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows - alex_c
http://shoooes.net/

======
dhotson
This is really fantastic stuff, I'm a big fan of _why's work.

I really love the principle behind this:
[http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicam...](http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html)

I hope that this can help make programming as fun and accessible as it was on
the C64. I grew up learning QBasic, taking for granted that I could draw some
stuff to the screen and play music in a handful lines of code.

~~~
alex_c
Thanks, I hadn't read that article.

For me, this is part of the magic of the Facebook platform. There would be
"How do I..." posts on the platform forums, from people who clearly had no web
development experience at all (and probably no programming experience in
general). They made me realize that the Facebook platform, in its own way,
captured some of the magic of writing a game in QBasic (or, before that,
Z80/Commodore/whatever) and passing it along to your friends. All your friends
use Facebook, none of you are hackers, but you make something neat on Facebook
and they get to use it, and they know YOU made it... because of the intimacy,
it's much more magical than just making a website or a desktop program.

Of course, it's a lot more complicated than it used to be. You can't just get
a simple Basic program and start messing with it. You need to find hosting,
with PHP, maybe MySQL, get the API client, figure out how to get it all
working together, upload it... it's far from newbie friendly.

But still, I wouldn't be surprised if there are hundreds of kids today who
first got into programming by asking the question "How do I make a Facebook
app?"

I definitely agree with _why that we need more of this.

------
iigs
Mad props to _why.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of shoes. I tried an earlier version and found it
just a bit lacking in features for things I wanted to do (networking, I
think). Obviously this is the idea -- everybody wants a language that is
nothing but exactly the features they want/need, but all of my sample
application ideas were things that were going to need some kind of networking
(network tic-tac-toe), and it didn't look like I could do what I wanted with
it.

The last time I talked to a kid about computer programming, I asked what
they'd want to write, and they said "a game", and drilling down I came to the
conclusion that what they really wanted was a level editor for an otherwise
complete game engine.

Obviously this is aimed at someone subtly different, but I think it this idea
extended to have some graphics/network/game oriented gimmies would be _really_
popular.

~~~
misuba
Why should a GUI toolkit have networking features?

~~~
zenspider
_points to x11 and squeak smalltalk_

that's why... GUI objects that have intrinsic knowledge of networking are
actually really powerful and useful.

~~~
duane
Really?

------
joshwa
oh my god the docs: <http://hackety.org/press/nks.html>

it reads right to left (click on the left hand page of the spread to advance).

Brilliant zine-like design aesthetic.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I highly recommend the paper version. Very reasonably priced.

Ironically, I haven't found the time to actually read it, but I page through
it now and then just to admire the thing.

------
nihilocrat
You see, I was about to make a snide little "too much jazz and hip styling and
not enough, well, stuff I haven't seen before" comment, but when they put the
"we need 21st century BASIC" wrapper around it, it sounds nice as a toy /
prototype library.

I made an attempt a few years ago at making a python library that would try to
achieve the same sorts of things (more of just a wrapper around pygame,
really), but never really had the motivation to keep running with it. With
some extra ease-of-use wrapping around cocos2d, I think the goal would be met.

------
ldenman
I got excited when I saw this. Unfortunately, Shoes' text is not displaying
right off the bat on MBP running Leopard. I like the idea and especially some
of the graphic demos(good-follow).

------
thomasfl
My 13 year old son have never programmed a single line of code, but spends
hours watching anime on youtube. I'll try to see if I can teach him to program
ruby.

    
    
       >print MCMLXVII + 41
       2008
    

A language that you can hack to be able to process expressions like this, must
be the most pleasent langauge there is right now.

------
hhm
It actually seems very similar to TkInter, though simpler.

~~~
gaius
The amusing thing about Shoes is that it is something that existed (with more
capability) in the Tcl/Tk community 10 years ago, and it's only gotten better
since then. If people wanted to develop the short of applications that Shoes
enables then they could have been, and indeed, would already be.

------
azharcs
Why doesn't _shoes_ still have a wiki page. Great work _why. Downloading the
pdf now, this weekend will be awesome.

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qhoxie
Shoes is a really impressive exercise in simplicity. I've found it great for
prototyping tasks.

------
mdolon
This man is pure creative genius...

------
revorad
That looks damn neat.

