bromagosa

Yup, totally. Power feature discoverability is not where we shine... :p

Yes, I totally agree that the website needs to make the important aspects apparent right away :)

We've been basically focused on finalizing the last details before launching beta, but reworking the website is on our list of urgent tasks, possibly even before the launch, who knows!

In Snap!, GP and MicroBlocks there's a pretty powerful keyboard interface to assemble blocks. I use it all the time instead of dragging blocks. Check out page 115 of the Snap! reference manual here: https://snap.berkeley.edu/snap/help/SnapManual.pdf

Jens Mönig implemented keyboard input for both GP and Snap!, so the same hotkeys will work on both. Since we're using GP for the MicroBlocks GUI, the same will also work on MicroBlocks.

Hi Avi! Let me first say that my final project at university was about Seaside, and that project landed me a Smalltalk job that marked the beginning of my professional life as a developer. I can't thank you enough!

Regarding Teensy boards, it would have to be version >3.0, because MicroBlocks uses 32 bit instructions and needs at least 16kb of RAM. The Teensy 3.0 just about meets the requirements, and 3.1 exceeds them comfortably.

We don't yet support any M4 MCUs, but we do support a couple of M0s, so I think porting the VM to the Teensy should be fairly easy. I don't currently have one, but I see they're cheap, so I'm going to order one and try to find some time to work on the port :)

If you'd like to, we can continue the discussion over email at interest (at) microblocks (dot) fun.

Actually, there are no similar projects that I can tell of. MakeCode, the "one that comes with the micro:bit", as you say, is not a live language and only works for a couple of boards. It's not even a language, it's a façade for an underlying text language.

To sum up what's different about MicroBlocks:

* It is blocks based.

* It is live. That means you can change scripts in real time while they're running. You can see the result of running any block in real time. You don't have to wait for any compilation/upload cycles.

* It is autonomous. You can disconnect the board at any point, and the program will keep running in it.

* It is parallel. You can run multiple tasks at the same time.

* It is portable. It runs in several boards thanks to our VM approach.

There was no language that did all these, so we made our own :)

Glad to see MicroBlocks on the front page of HN!

I'm one of the project devs. Feel free to AMA :)

microblocks.fun is still in Alpha, but check it out nevertheless! It works on lots of 32 bit microcontrollers.

It's been tested on the micro:bit, circuit playground express, calliope and several Arduinos.

Great! Congratulations on the web redesign as well!

Nope, you need to have contents in Catalan in your .cat site, not for six months but forever. I couldn't find this 6-months clause anywhere, and the terms don't mention it at all: http://fundacio.cat/ca/domini/sobre-el-cat/normativa

Furthermore, they clearly say that violation of the only usage restriction (contents in Catalan) can result in your domain being suspended.

edit: Just a little correction to your text in Catalan: L'idioma català és una llengua bonica. ;)

I tried the URL that's shown at the end of the video and it didn't work :(

Any live demos?

Well, opensourcing a product doesn't forbid you to earn from it, but that's your personal decision ;)

Is it opensource? I'd love to see the code.

Ship it as a mobile app, seriously!

I was thinking exactly the same thing! What kind of stuff would you want to keep on a straight trajectory and prevent from steering?

Many studies that seem unpractical or even stupid at first sight become genius when somebody finds a problem to which they are an elegant and obvious solution.

But we also do have curly braces! For dynamic arrays! ;)

{ Number. #someSymbol. 5 + 6. [ :anArgument | anArgument doSomething ] value: 'some string goes here'. #(3 'hi'). 1000 factorial }

«The first true object-oriented language. But it seems to me Smalltalk is pretty much a forgotten language.»

Why do so many people kill Smalltalk so fast?

I could give so many URLs to illustrate how Smalltalk has a stable and growing community, with so many open projects and people making a living out of it, teaching it in universities and using it for research, but I think these two links sum it all up:

http://forum.world.st/ http://smalltalkjobs.wordpress.com/

Thanks, English is not my native language, as you may have noticed :P

Just a linguistic tip:

«mucho more information» sounds really bad. Information in Spanish is Información, which has female gender. Thus, you should better write «mucha more information».

Which was itself a copy of an older game called SFCave, which was a copy of some much older game I can't remember...

I once wrote a similar game featuring a penguin swimming through an underwater cave (http://reggaeperxics.com/cave.html), and I recall I managed to discover the story of the original game, but for the life of me I can't seem to find it anywhere on the Internet now!

Yes, but there have been thousands of clones of SFCave and only this one has been that successful.

I think I recall the original one featured an helicopter and ran on an Amiga, or something of the sort.

Actually, the first thing I did when getting my first Android phone about 4 years ago was downloading a version of SFCave for Android, and it's been on all of my subsequent phones ever since.

Well indeed, but the exact same URL, only submitted one month later, should at least have reverted some karma on the user who submitted the project originally. Especially if the project was of his own creation...

Actually, I never understood how promotion works here.

As an example, I submitted a website about a project of our own a couple months ago and got 4 points. Never made it past the "new" page.

A month later, someone else submitted exactly the same project and got 70 votes, getting to the front page and resulting in about 30.000 visits to our site.

Same content, different user.

So is this site about interesting content? Or about WHO submits this content?

Inkscape, mainly!

For sound, I first check http://www.freesound.org/, then if I'm unlucky I end up using Audacity

  «Flanary believes it's paramount that if someone is
  criminally charged on the basis of his words, a jury needs
  to see all the words.»

My favourite quote:

  Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.

Actually, other stuff came up, but after a first trip in 2003 I almost did. Got friends who went there to study and another friend who was exiled there as a political refugee.

Could be that, but that would indeed be a misinterpretation. Could also be that people who don't agree with a reasoning tend to try to twist other people's words to make their arguments look wrong.

Anyway, I'll try to be stupid and mean next time so there is no ambiguity.

Exactly! The US (or the land of freedom), doesn't let you in if they find out you've as much as visited Cuba. That's why Cuba gives you your visa in hand (as opposed to stuck in a page in your passport), so that you can still go to the US if you want to.

That is, unless you're Cuban. In that case you can go to the US and they'll welcome you to Miami with a red carpet and fool you with what freedom and cars and big houses and laptops you'll be able to have.

I don't think both countries are run in the same way, I know they are not.

What I don't know is how you inferred I did think in that way from my comment.

Unlike in the US, where the government doesn't spy on the citizens, everybody has free access to education, free universal healthcare, guaranteed housing and... oh wait.