BTW the team has received a well-deserved ISMM Best Paper award for their work. I just want to say a huge congrats to all of them who I have seen work very hard on this paper!
Readit Newsbelmarca commented on A Dynamic Graph Approach to Immediate Cycle Collection dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/laurenth
belmarca commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
Instead of a landing page, may I suggest a '?' button, or at least putting the landing page on https://codeboot.org/something and redirecting from referrers but not direct loads?
Browsers are getting more and more aggressive about deleting cookies / making cookies ephemeral, and nothing is more annoying that dealing with one or multiple pop-ups on each page visit.
For an example of how bad it can get, load LMarena in a private window.
Cookie pop-up, agree > type something, press enter > ToS pop-up, agree > press enter again > processing > answer > type somethi- verify Cloudflare, agree > type something
We are thinking about using two domains: codeboot.org for "company" things, and codeboot.app for the actual IDE and user applications. Or vice-versa.
We don't want to break the current experience but we need to do a better job of explaining what our software can do.
I appreciate your comments!
belmarca commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
Can I just say I adore the absolute utility of the UX and UI?
No welcome screen, just dropped straight into the main interface which itself has no excess buttons or styling wasted on it.
To me this is beautiful.
Really glad you appreciate! We use it to teach introductory programing courses and the simplistic UI is purpose-built for that use-case.
It really is a joy to program with, but we're struggling a bit to communicate everything it can do. We are working hard on that front and should have a landing page and better explanatory material soon. We're very interested in feedback. If anybody wants to learn more, just contact me through the email in my profile.
Cheers!
belmarca commented on Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends pontus.granstrom.me/scrap... · Posted by u/8organicbits
I like the spirit of it, but the execution isn't what I'm looking for. With this being a hosted solution, it makes me dependent on another SaaS tool for little personal projects. If it's a little counter needed for an afternoon, that's not such a big deal. However, if I'm looking for a scrappy little app I may use for years, this is a problem. Plus, no matter how low the learning curve gets, it will still exist, so I want something that I can use for the long term for things like this. This makes my mind go to approachable and easy languages that allow the user to easily throw a GUI on it. I don't think code needs to be completely abstracted away, just made easy and tailored to what people will do. Look at how many people on MySpace were able to learn some CSS. Maybe they copy and paste someone else's stuff at first, but that's the foot in the door before they eventually look at how to tweak it.
I typically end up using basic HTML/CSS/JS for stuff like this today. If I really need backend code, I'll use basic PHP (no frameworks or anything). But this ties me to a browser, which I'm not always a fan of. Some of these fairly scrappy little projects at work (done in the browser like this, and with AutoHotKey) have been going for 10+ years now, with very little maintenance. The AHK script I haven't touched in probably 8 years, since I moved to macOS at work, yet people still use it countless times per day. If AHK decides to stop operating, it's no big deal, the code that exists will still run. The same can't be said for these SaaS solution to this problem. People looking for scrappy solutions aren't looking to remake their solution every time a founder decides to move on to something else more interesting or profitable.
You should check out https://codeboot.org .
It's a fully client-side Python IDE with single-stepping, a virtual (non-hierarchical) filesystem, an FFI to call JS code and a few other things (see the docs). Sharing apps in CodeBoot is trivial: right-click the "play" button and copy a shareable URL. I have helped people solve data wrangling problems using CodeBoot and they now have their little app bookmarked. It works really well.
I could go on for a while. AMA if you're interested. We're actively working on it and some great new features are on the way!
belmarca commented on DeskHog, an open-source developer toy posthog.com/deskhog... · Posted by u/constantinum
Hardware is becoming more accessible, so more software companies are going to release hardware products or build hardware products for internal purposes. The future of physical world innovation isn't going to come from legacy hardware corpos, but from software companies that run hardware experiments that become real hardware products. Hats off to Posthog for making it cool!
The reason hardware has sucked in the past is poor tooling. But now open-source solutions are getting pretty good, and AI is covering many knowledge gaps.
This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].
Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it directly from codeBoot.
BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blinxinc (working on a landing page)
[2]: https://codeboot.org (also working on a landing page)
belmarca commented on Lisping at JPL (2002) flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.... · Posted by u/adityaathalye
Author here. This pops up on HN regularly, which I'm happy to see, but it's pretty dated at this point. Here is a more recent update:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited...
And, as always, AMA.
Hi :) You should check out Gerbil Scheme (https://cons.io). It is built on top of Gambit Scheme (https://gambitscheme.org) and has the generics you are looking for.
belmarca commented on Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler github.com/astracompiler/... · Posted by u/qwertycodepl
yeah it's not but i don't know how to call it. if i say it's bundler it will be more confusing in my opinion. waiting for your suggestions!
But it's definitely not a compiler! I think "Astra - a new js2exe bundler" is much less ambiguous because it's... a bundler!
belmarca commented on Show HN: Astra – a new js2exe compiler github.com/astracompiler/... · Posted by u/qwertycodepl
I clicked on this hoping for an actual compiler. However from what I can see this is a bundler. The name is confusing.
It was more "ha ha only serious" than purely tongue-in-cheek. I'm familiar with Gambit's multi-backend targeting and have experimented with its JS backend. I consider it one of the quickest, and most comprehensive, ways to get "Scheme in the browser".
BTW I'd love to hear your feedback if you have tried the above examples!
Maybe we can convince Marc Feeley to write a backend for Gambit that targets this.
Hey, I'm writing this from Pr Feeley's lab :)
I understand your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but we certainly have an interest in cross-language interoperability! You can check out our work here:
- https://try.gambitscheme.org is Gambit compiled to JavaScript with the universal backend. Evaluate \alert("hello!") at the REPL to see the JS<->Scheme Syntactic FFI in action.
- https://codeboot.org is our own Python interpreter running in the browser. It has a Python<->JS FFI. Evaluate \alert("hello!") at the REPL to test it out. You can even import JS libraries using the standard Python syntax by replacing the identifier with a string: import "https://mycdn.com/mylibrary.js".
- https://github.com/gambit/python is a Gambit module that integrates Gambit with CPython, using the same syntactic FFI. You can import PyPI modules from Gambit.
References to conferences/papers describing these features can be found on my GH profile (https://github.com/belmarca). AMA if you wish!