Can someone explain to me what the point of all these new visual programming things is?

t. I don't know that words can have multiple meanings
htps://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/art
see 4th definition

Programming for pajeet kids. At least is useful to introduce them in the subject

...

...

>>>Holla Forums

>>>Holla Forums

I remember when I used to make maps for Starcraft. This picture is pretty much how you do it.

>>>Holla Forums

>>>/bog/

This.

To be fair though, I would have liked this as a child. In fact I had some "create your own games" program that worked a bit like this. When I was 10 I really liked playing around with the Logo.

*with Logo.
Playing "with the logo" is what a Holla Forums larper does.

Have any of you actually used it? I used one as part of a paid study in Uni during my first year. Everyone in the study was in Programming 1 and had already completed a couple projects and several labs, yet almost nobody could complete a simple fucking input-output loop in the lego GUI (I was the only one who finished, but I was also the most experienced). The problem is that the GUI is so rigid that you can't even get your ideas down onto the screen. You also don't have a way to quickly select a function if you already know what you want. So if you know you want the print function, you still have to scroll through a sloppy toolbox to go get it instead of just typing it in.

tl;dr, Lego coding actually makes coding HARDER TO LEARN for EVERYONE. If you're worried that it'll encourage more people to enter the industry, worry no more. Lego coding is certain to SCARE PEOPLE AWAY. Languages like Python or Ruby are far more of a threat to your elite ivory tower than this shit is.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. These lego GUIs don't even really add more abstraction than a language like Python. They just replace the normal function names with more "English sounding" phrases and words, and make refactoring a bitch.

That is solved very easily by adding search box to GUI.

Just to be clear, I was talking about LOGO, some younger people here might not know what that was.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

Your problem was that you had ideas of your own. Those restriction and the lack of abstractions are part of what makes these environments easier to use for women and IQ 85 people. Those people don't think (they can't) they just follow instructions and change a value here and there.

I've tried using scratch, it's needlessly hard, nothing is where it should be and everything is too loose to be useful for a beginner. Game Maker's drag and drop was pretty good, it shows you exactly where your stuff needs to go, doesn't give you too many hints off the bat (so your brain actually has to work a bit) and you could mix in drag and drop blocks and code (including putting code in drag and drop blocks) so the change from visual to real code is waaaaay smoother.

We used that on Apple //e computers in first and second grade. Good times.

are you implying women are (sub) IQ 85?

this isn't anything new
youtu.be/u7KIZQzYSls

No, that's why I wrote "women and IQ 85 people." There are cognitive tasks where the average woman performs comparable to a man with below average intelligence, however. Which is why programming tends to be more difficult for women.

Programming is not more difficult for women. That's just as stupid as saying math or science is harder for women. It's not.

why is programming harder for women?

Because men and women are different. Math and other highly abstract mental activities are harder for women. You can reeee about it as much as you want.

Tell that to the idiot research grant scammers who coded the thing. UI and functionality are not the purpose of these programs.

No, there were several women and nonwhite people in the study, and all of them struggled to use the code legos, while they were all capable of coding in an IDE.

Master race wins again.

Great way to open the door of programming to children and noobs. Makes it easy to introduce programming concepts without being bogged down with syntax, language specific intricacies, and other stuff. Also way easier to keep a kid, or a noob's attention with something like this than expecting them to be autistically into BASIC like back in the olden days.

If you think that's bad, look at LabView. They try to teach it to engineers instead of programming and it looks like a fucking Pollack painting once you get past a hello world.

a better way would be adding some simplified scripting language into a creative game like minecraft, which is genuinely useful in the game.

There are some really fun mods for the Java version of Minecraft that actually do that.

Writing a good and enjoyable documentation is a key part of programming. These visual programming stuff do that on-the-fly. The kid writes the documentation in this visual manner, and the software writes the program accordingly.

>>>/out/

Not worth the risk of your kid ending up a minecraft sperg, for the chance that he might get into scripting or redstone. Would much rather give them an older thinkpad with scratch, and other educational and creative software slapped on.

theres no way you're being unironic here

being entirely sincere fam

Why are you Holla Forums faggots so scatterbrained? This thread is about the lego coding GUIs. It's not a racial dickwaving contest. I'm saying that the GUIs don't even meet their purpose of making coding easier, and your response is
which is a complete non sequitur.

no, scripting languages are a much better gateway.

That's the funny thing about people who want to promote diversity. There is some inherent complexity in programming. But they can't accept this so they insist on making it superficially easy in a way that doesn't actually work.

I agree that if you want diversity you should just push languages like Python and Ruby. And I wouldn't think this was a bad thing, it's good to make things easier for beginners. But it won't allow literally everyone to code and so it won't satisfy the SJWs. Their ideology forces them to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

you're ten times more autistic than any child who plays with digital legos, user.

I think he isn't being autistic enough. He should be reverse engineering the whole mainboard, with all the components, and making a guide on how to re-make it for his kid to do himself as a mini-project.

It's not really a new concept. Companion makes it dead simple to use GNU Radio. You can write programs directly in python, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier being able to visualize all of the blocks.

That's outright false when current American school stats show that girls are getting higher math results than boys.

...

Girls do better in schools/college because they can sit down and listen better while boys want to do something physical.

You've outed yourselves as either women or white knighting liberals, its pretty funny actually.
post your source so I can tear it apart.
I'm expecting common core and other garbage that nobody should take seriously.

you're a good sport for answering them seriously.

Ah, another example illustrating how shit object oriented programming is.

all the best teaching methods were already there 30 years ago:
youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLAA97f8v5JX5WRZ6DUBSsogXlG4biWinL
All the good book are also from the 80s/90s

Anyway if they learn this but can't find the "reasons"(passion) to make something out of it then it's useless and they should try to find something that they like.
Teaching is quite hard and the people learning are too young to know if they like it or not, the only people who are really good at computing are either people with a love of mathematical background or were actually [insert horrible event/decease] that fucked them up and isolated themselves into computing.

Then why are you programming? This the way things have been since the late 80s.

This. Every good programming or math book I've picked up has been from the 80s/90s.

I agree with this, but how do you expect a 4 year old to sit through 20 hours of SICP?

I don't expect a 4 years old to learn about computers has much has I don't expect them to learn about sand casting.

The USA education system is collapsing to the point where many school-leavers are borderline illiterate. They have to teach the adult babies how to program using hieroglpyhs, as the world segues to a Mandarin-dominated economy.

Logographs save space and are no harder to read once learned, you read the same amount of information in the same amount of time.
Logographs+phonetic marks for conjugation is the ultimate writing system.

Get kids brains thinking in OOP terms.

Here's the problem OP. It looks like you're playing a game for pre- and/or early-literate children. I hope that makes you feel better

It would be fine if it were actually teaching programming, but it really isn't. Instead, every graphical programming language I've seen creates a bunch of dependencies on GUI elements for the program logic. If you were a complete novice, you wouldn't be able to discern which problems are the result of the programming environment and which are the result of the program.

Intentionally missing the point of the thread doesn't make you smart. OP isn't asking for suggestions on one he should use, he's suggesting there's little benefit for introducing programming through these interfaces.

Python ships with a turtle module, so LOGO is pretty much still alive.