Screenshot Sunday: Join Me In The Spiral (Patreon)

Oh hey, a Patreon update!  This week, I added a powerful new feature to my upcoming "programming with plain words" tool -- variables & basic math!

COME JOIN ME IN THE SPIRAL
(sped-up GIF | high-rez video on twitter)

Also, I'd like to clarify from last week: the point of this project is NOT to teach programming.  It can be used for that (and I'm glad if it does!) but I hope it's much more than that!  Think of, say, Microsoft Excel.  It's not meant to teach you how to crunch numbers manually, but it lets anybody use the raw power of numbers -- for business, education, or their own personal life.

That's what I hope this project will be like!  (except less corporate & boring than Excel)  It will be a standalone JavaScript library that lets anybody use the power of loops/if-thens/variables/etc for whatever they want.  (That's another reason why this is different from MIT's Scratch: you can only use Scratch inside Scratch.)

The LOGO turtle above is just one example of what you can make with this tool.  Here's a few more concrete examples:

For Explorable Explanations:

• In The Evolution of Trust, I originally wanted people to be able to create their own game theory strategies, but there was no tool to let players "program" behavior.  With this tool, I can do that!  (at least, for a future game theory explorable)
  
• LOOPY v1.0 does not currently let you create very complex behavior. No "if x>y, then z" thresholds, no "at time t, do x" events, etc.  With this tool, maybe LOOPY v2.0 can do that!
  
• In the future, I want to make more tools that let people create their own complex, emergent systems.  Like social systems, agent-based modeling, complex networks, non-linear dynamics, etc.  All of those require some way to "program" behavior over time.

Outside Explorable Explanations:

When I posted the GIF last week, a few programmers said they could see using this for their own tools! Such as:

• Creating procedurally generated tweets/stories (using this + Tracery)
• Creating VR scenes (using this + GuriVR)
• Creating procedurally generated music (using this + Jazzari)

And here's other non-explorable-explanation uses I'd like to see:

• Creating game AIs & level designs
• Querying & filtering data
• Bringing back HyperCard????? 

Long story short, if you want to make things that do things, this tool may help!  Because right now, 99% of how people do that is through "coding": abstract symbols, no live feedback, hard to understand even if you wrote the code yourself.

My hope is, one day, the way we currently do programming will look as quaint as poking holes into punched cards.  (seriously, go watch Bret Victor's talk, Media For Thinking The Unthinkable)  No, I know, this tool will not replace coding-with-abstract-symbols any time soon... but hopefully, for now, for the vast majority of people who are not programmers, it'll let them get a taste for what it means to make something that does something.

That, I think, is the ultimate joy of creation.

<3,
~ Nicky Case

P.S: I still don't have a name for this project. Any suggestions?