Neat idea. I don't know why localizing the language sparked so much resistance, except that it presumably puts another step in the way of making it converge with Python. I didn't see how that's addressed.

So the petty syntax errors are really the biggest obstacle for kids, huh?

Apparently. Listening to this story had me thinking about the Myths & Mythconceptions episode of FoC. Hedy could be one of those directions not previously considered by language designers that’s actually really worth exploring further. Not what I’d pictured at the time, but if it gets more folks closer to computational thinking I’m here for it :)

She had a good talk at Splash last year that described some of the resistance she faced

felienne.com/archives/8470

2024.splashcon.org/profile/feliennehermans

youtube.com/live/-Br66SUjsdQ?si=ScRx06iCt7iPE85e

Felienne’s talk starts at the 3:20:30 mark

I was lucky enough to work with Felienne in Hedy a few years ago. It is a really cool project and she's completely passionate about it and the mission.

It's an interesting idea and I also had the opportunity to work on the project a bit (only the CI/CD of it, not the language itself). Because each "level" has new language concepts and it's localized, there are basically N * M variants of the language. Where N is the amount of levels and M is the amount of support i18n languages.

I've tried it recently with my kids (9 & 11) but they preferred the minecraft puzzles on code.org by quite a lot.

Just looking at the video, I don't feel like I have an intuition for what cutting a selection or pasting it will actually do. I'm not thinking in trees when I'm looking at text. Does that get easier with practice? If you are going to navigate and manipulate it as a tree, why not display it that way?

I personally found it easy to grasp, probably because I'm used to having syntactic cursor movement in my day-to-day text editor. I found the demo to be a bit strange at first, but I got the hang of it relatively quickly. Still not sure how efficient I'd be with it in a normal context, but the only way to know would be to use it for a few weeks at least.

Also as for why not display it as a tree, I think in some sense it is, actually. You wouldn't want to edit code that's displayed as a tree with lines connecting nodes, so in practice it's better to do something more compact, and which conveys the semantics of the code. For example, having a new line for each let expression make sense in terms of high-level organization, but splitting function calls across multiple lines makes no sense most of the time. It's more readable to put everything closely together, even if it hides the tree structure a bit more.

the most import part is at 13:40 ... programmingsimplicity.substack.com/p/functions-and-pipes?r=1egdky

Awesome. Here's a mirror: mastodon.social/@alexwarth/113884515097120460