Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?
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@masonwheeler I bet your mom also says you're handsome and a "real catch" too.
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@blakeyrat said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@masonwheeler I bet your mom also says you're handsome and a "real catch" too.
LOL
My 4 yo remembers the story so it could look like she is reading. I know she isn't yet.
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@karla Yeah, that trick stops working when you put a new book in front of them.
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Non-text programming with...text.
GitHub - aaronjanse/asciidots: Esolang inspired by ASCII art
Esolang inspired by ASCII art. Contribute to aaronjanse/asciidots development by creating an account on GitHub.
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@karla Yeah, that trick stops working when you put a new book in front of them.
Yeah, not convinced. But I am just a random stranger on the internet. My thoughts on it are meaningless.
OTOH I do know there are studies that show PUSHING* kids to learn too soon is detrimental to their later academic development.
*Note - I am not saying you were pushed, this more of the statement expecting all children to be able to read by age 5.
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@karla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
OTOH I do know there are studies that show PUSHING* kids to learn too soon is detrimental to their later academic development.
This doesn't surprise me. Pushing young children on just about any developmental issue tends to be counterproductive.
*Note - I am not saying you were pushed, this more of the statement expecting all children to be able to read by age 5.
Yeah, that actually kinda had me laughing over here. My love of reading was a source of exasperation to my parents more than once, leading to complaints about having my "nose stuck in a book" when I "should be" focusing on other things.
(Same with video gaming, too. I recall my mom constantly complaining about me "wasting my life" on games. I haven't heard much of that ever since I told her how I used a technique I first picked up from Starcraft scripting to solve a serious programming issue, and then managed to use a game development project to show the interviewers at my first programming job that I was worth hiring.)
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
No, coding is hard because it's solving hard problems.
Kinda. The hardest part of coding is chunking the big, hard problem into small, easy ones. That's where using pictures or icons can help a lot. Even early math classes start out with pictures and math operation symbols, then replace the pictures with numbers, then replace the numbers and symbols with "word problems", which describe a "real-world" type of problem using the same concepts.
The article's author was just stating that the SpriteBox Coding team was discovering this applies to other kinds of problems, too.
For people who don't have the talent for coding, is it really a bad thing to have them think programming's not for them?
No, it's not a bad thing, but it is better to learn earlier whether one has the aptitude for it, and making it easier to learn overall leads to more people with the aptitude not being scared away by the supposed complexity.
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Yeah, that actually kinda had me laughing over here. My love of reading was a source of exasperation to my parents more than once, leading to complaints about having my "nose stuck in a book" when I "should be" focusing on other things.
Both my parents read a lot, so wan't really an issue.
I remember biking to the library and taking out stacks of books.
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@blakeyrat said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
The real point I wanted to bring up here is that these guys wanted to know if their software was good for X, so they actually tried testing it at X and observed the results and iterated based on that. That's extremely rare in IT today, because this is a shit industry full of morons who are shit at software development.
There may be a lot of user testing in the industry, but not necessarily for the benefit of the users.
For example all those dark patterns to give them your email or buy their shit - I am sure they are perfected with constant A-B testing.
Or mobile games, designed to be addictive - that surely requires a lot of testing to find the effective formula.
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@karla Yeah, that trick stops working when you put a new book in front of them.
I read the Little House on the Prairie series on my own when I was 4 and 5. My mom got her undergrad degree in English and her master's in Elementary Education and she had taught me the alphabet and a few words, but even she was surprised when I asked her what some of the longer/more difficult words were.
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I remember reading Asterix books before I started school, so at 4 years old. I don't know how much was just looking at the pictures though.
But no matter how early a child starts reading, at 5 it's still significant cognitive overhead rather than the adult way of looking at a word and not being able to help reading it. You don't internalise words like that until quite a bit later
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
The thing that bugs me about that is that their photon torpedoes are supposed to use antimatter warheads. This is literally the most powerful explosive that can possibly exist, according to our current understanding of physics at least. Why would you need "special high explosives" when your ship (either of them) has photon torpedoes?
The tricobalt explosives Voyager was carrying were specifically noted that they not only caused explosions in realspace but could also cause subspace ruptures, which regular antimatter charges don't do. That would not only cause damage but also disrupt things like subspace communications and warp drive (since you can't create a warp bubble in a subspace rupture).
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@e4tmyl33t Huh. TIL.
So what's the difference between that and the weird molecule that the Borg essentially worshiped, which Starfleet deemed so dangerous that it had a secret rule to destroy this thing at all costs, superseding even the Prime Directive, if it were ever encountered? The thing that made it so terrible was that it disrupted subspace and made it impossible to go to warp.
(What was it called? Omega? Not sure ATM)
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@e4tmyl33t Huh. TIL.
So what's the difference between that and the weird molecule that the Borg essentially worshiped, which Starfleet deemed so dangerous that it had a secret rule to destroy this thing at all costs, superseding even the Prime Directive, if it were ever encountered? The thing that made it so terrible was that it disrupted subspace and made it impossible to go to warp.
(What was it called? Omega? Not sure ATM)
Same result, different source. Tricobalt weapons were stable enough to be carried around until intentionally detonated. Omega molecules were inherently unstable and prone to exploding at the drop of a hat, with much larger subspace effects as a side-effect.
Omega molecule | Memory Alpha | Fandom
An Omega molecule is a highly unstable molecule and the most powerful substance known to exist. The Borg knew it as Particle 010. The molecule could be synthesized with sufficient amounts of...
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
That's... actually a valid point. Why did the author wait until the very end of the article to present it?
On the other hand, it could be that textual representation is just another hump that's so fundamental to real coding that it was never identified before. This research is very interesting: it suggests that the reason why we keep seeing stuff on the front page that makes us go "
Doesn't this guy even know about <insert really simple concept here>?!?" is because a lot of people are literally just not capable of grasping the really simple concepts of programming.Oh my fucking god, another "camel has two humps" idiot?
First of all, it was no research. This paper was never really published, it was self-published and as such made rounds through the net. It was never peer reviewed. Nothing
Secondly, holy shit. It was retracted like ages ago. It was disavowed by its very author.
What's my point? Stop being a dick. You are a dick. You are being a dick. Stop it. It's not cool. You shouldn't be doing it. Just stop. Stop it. Stop.
Please, stop being a dick.
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@magus said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
And I absolutely reject the premise that basic programming is beyond most people. It's beyond some, even some who want to do it, but there's no way I'm going to accept that most people can't do it.
Did you read the research paper I linked?
Oh my dog, @Magus, don't read this link. It was a biased study done by
a depressedan SSRI treated clinically depressed guy who became grandiose because of the therapy, who never really published the paper, so it was never peer reviewed, just made rounds through the net because of people like @masonwheeler, which in this particular case I want to mean dicks.And it was later retracted by its very author, so…
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@kt_ I've read it before. I've also read numerous takedowns. I've also never seen any other study claiming the same effect, always a bit of a red flag when it comes to science
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@jaloopa said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@kt_ I've read it before. I've also read numerous takedowns. I've also never seen any other study claiming the same effect, always a bit of a red flag when it comes to science
Exactly. That's why it pains me so much to see this stuff repeated over and over and even here, especially since the claim went unchallenged for like a hundred posts (granted, a bulk of which were off topic, but hey, I'd have to be new here to complain about that!).
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I have not used this product, but I have used a number of the Blockly based environments. It is amazing what young children (some under 5) have been able to accomplish.
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@kt_ I don't need to read that paper to know its wrong.
At all my time at university, I only met one person who couldn't do programming. He was an artist, and just couldn't get his head around it. Everyone else I've ever met has the basic skills needed. My adoptive brother, who hates math, loves guns, and made almost no effort in school could learn programming if he wanted to, and I can say that with absolute confidence.
Most people don't care, but that's a very different thing from being unable to do it at all. And if most people couldn't do it, I have a hard time believing our species would still be alive. I'm as cynical of humanity's general intelligence as they get, and I still believe that logic is something most people have enough of for programming.
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@blakeyrat said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Worf actually has a pretty consistent arc throughout both Next Gen and DS9, IMO.
I dunno. To me, going back and rewatching TNG as an adult, Worf seems to be primarily depicted as "big barbarian warrior who exists mostly to get thrown around in order to show how tough the most recent threat is." Heck, that happened to him so often that they named a TVTropes page after it:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect
DS9 was where he really started getting characterization beyond that. (And where it stopped happening to him so much, to boot.)
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
DS9 was where he really started getting characterization beyond that. (And where it stopped happening to him so much, to boot.)
The "really" bit is you ignoring the whole thing about him having a relationship with his son, all the stuff to do with his position in society, his conflict at being raised by humans, his love for opera...
Because those aren't him really being developed as a character. Those are just him being thrown away to show off how strong someone is.
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@boomzilla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Extrapolating this to code that solves problems of average real life complexity (which probably doesn't really exist given the wide range of problems we all see)? GIBBERISH.
Not everything is an n-tier system.
Real life example: I'm pedantic about my MP3 collection. I figured I want album art on all my MP3 files. So I whipped up a quick program that takes all my MP3s, groups them by album and shows them in one pane, takes all the JPGs from a folder and shows them in another pane, so when I select an album and a cover and click a button it tags all MP3s in that album with that image.
It's a ridiculously simple program flow. Both file operations and MP3 tagging operations are very much abstractible given a good library. It seems like a project that could be whipped up in one of those toy languages. And yet it solves a real life need.
We're not dragging people kicking and screaming to become professional programmers, we want them to be power users. To automate the mundane stuff that they do in day to day life. The code they put out will likely be horrendous and will only work on their machines, but it's good enough.
@karla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@boomzilla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
to make fun of Mason regarding his claimed age of literacy.
I have serious doubts about this too.
Sounds like my friend about her son who supposedly said mama at 3 weeks.
2,5 years here to start reading, so definitely possible unless my mother lied to me. She claims I kept coming up to people and reading their newspapers aloud, so unless I was secretly watching the news while no one was looking, I think it's legit.
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@magus said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
The "really" bit is you ignoring the whole thing about him having a relationship with his son, all the stuff to do with his position in society, his conflict at being raised by humans, his love for opera...
Because those aren't him really being developed as a character. Those are just him being thrown away to show off how strong someone is.Right. The whole subplot about him regaining his family name and fixing his relationship with the brother he never knew he had was actually pretty interesting stuff. Also the whole "not all Klingons are like Worf, most Klingons laugh a lot and realize their 'murder everybody' philosophy is more abstract than real" is present from the very start-- I think season 2 is when Riker goes on a Klingon ship and says "I expected you guys to be like that sourpuss Worf".
What's interesting is Worf, growing up outside Klingon society, tries to be a Klingon but doesn't really know what that means. So he gets it wrong. Thus him not understanding the Klingon sense of humor, or taking honor way more seriously than actual Klingons do, etc. You see him get over that and grow as the series progresses.
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@magus said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Most people don't care, but that's a very different thing from being unable to do it at all. And if most people couldn't do it, I have a hard time believing our species would still be alive. I'm as cynical of humanity's general intelligence as they get, and I still believe that logic is something most people have enough of for programming.
To me it's kind of like writing. It's easy to learn to write at all, and most people have at least the mental ability to redact a comprehensible text that gets the message across, but not everyone will be a good writer that can make the work gripping or enjoyable to read even if they dedicate their entire life to it.
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@maciejasjmj (Building off your statement) Yet in school, we go to extreme effort to make sure that people are as equipped as possible for a world where writing/communication is important. And most people are able to figure out, maybe even in elementary school, if writing is something they enjoy.
I would go so far as to say programming is just as valuable, and the basic logic exercises teaching it will require benefits anyone.
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@blakeyrat said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Right. The whole subplot about him regaining his family name and fixing his relationship with the brother he never knew he had was actually pretty interesting stuff. Also the whole "not all Klingons are like Worf, most Klingons laugh a lot and realize their 'murder everybody' philosophy is more abstract than real" is present from the very start-- I think season 2 is when Riker goes on a Klingon ship and says "I expected you guys to be like that sourpuss Worf".
What's interesting is Worf, growing up outside Klingon society, tries to be a Klingon but doesn't really know what that means. So he gets it wrong. Thus him not understanding the Klingon sense of humor, or taking honor way more seriously than actual Klingons do, etc. You see him get over that and grow as the series progresses.
That's an interesting perspective, because it's actually kind of the opposite of what I see. When you get into the episodes that look closely at Klingon society and Klingon culture, one thing you see over and over again is that they claim to care about honor, but what they actually care about is appearing honorable. There are only two Klingons who I recall ever seeing being willing to do the right thing even though it will make them look bad: Martok and... Worf, the guy who was raised by humans outside of Klingon society.
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My take on abilities is: if you can read, write, grasp basic algebra (abstract thinking) and at least to a degree learn a language other than your native tongue (preferably with a different syntax rules), you can program.
Maybe you'll find it boring, but still it doesn't mean you cannot.
All musicians who do electronic music, create programs all the time. Some are aware of that, some are not.
I, for one, cannot stand visual programming, but that's just how I'm wired. I think mostly in "syntax". When thinking of a solution to a problem, it comes to me in a form of textual deacription, and not as a visual thingy of any kind. When contemplating a database design, I prefer reading its schema in SQL to looking at ERDs or anything else graphical or visual. Guess my right hemisphere is just dumber than other people's.
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@masonwheeler said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Yeah, that actually kinda had me laughing over here. My love of reading was a source of exasperation to my parents more than once, leading to complaints about having my "nose stuck in a book" when I "should be" focusing on other things.
Yeah, I would always be up late at night reading by night light, hiding under my comforter when my parents would go by so they wouldn't catch me. Whenever they did, they told me to stop because it'd ruin my eyes. Turns out they were right; thank God for LASIK. They'd also freak out about me having my "nose stuck in a book" while walking (never heard of peripheral vision?) and an elementary school teacher freaked out when she realized I had a recreational book inside my textbook but I was reading them both at once (she questioned me at length about the textbook).
Don't know why I shared any of that except your post reminded me of those long forgotten memories and it made me smile. Bet if there's one trait most of our forum regulars share, it's being a voracious reader.
@djls45 said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I read the Little House on the Prairie series on my own when I was 4 and 5. My mom got her undergrad degree in English and her master's in Elementary Education and she had taught me the alphabet and a few words, but even she was surprised when I asked her what some of the longer/more difficult words were.
I remember that being such a good series. I wonder if it still holds up. Speaking of pronunciation, I had problems for almost a decade because I'd pronounce things wrong, simply because they were words I'd read but never said. But I knew those were the words that I really wanted to use because I knew they "fit" more than any of the others.
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@heterodox said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I remember that being such a good series. I wonder if it still holds up. Speaking of pronunciation, I had problems for almost a decade because I'd pronounce things wrong, simply because they were words I'd read but never said. But I knew those were the words that I really wanted to use because I knew they "fit" more than any of the others.
I still don't know how to pronounce Drupal.
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@karla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I still don't know how to pronounce Drupal.
I pronounce it drew-pall, but have no idea if that's correct.
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@karla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I still don't know how to pronounce Drupal.
Droop hole.
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@kt_ said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
especially since the claim went unchallenged for like a hundred posts
That's mostly laziness and too much apathy to RTFA, I think. I remember that paper being lambasted around here a while ago.
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@maciejasjmj said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
We're not dragging people kicking and screaming to become professional programmers, we want them to be power users. To automate the mundane stuff that they do in day to day life. The code they put out will likely be horrendous and will only work on their machines, but it's good enough.
Yes, we agree on all this stuff.
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@heterodox said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I had problems for almost a decade because I'd pronounce things wrong, simply because they were words I'd read but never said
I still do. My wife corrects me on some word I've used in the correct context but mangled the pronunciation on an almost weekly basis
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@adynathos said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
There may be a lot of user testing in the industry, but not necessarily for the benefit of the users.
Exactly! The only people doing it are the people who are trying to sell something you don't actually need, like malware or games. The people who have stuff that solves real problems... just don't fucking care. They're not starting at 0 since they get, let's say 10 free points for solving a problem, so they give up on the other 90 points altogether. Malware starts at -50 and still somehow gets up there high enough to get clicks.
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@yamikuronue Even if a company is paying for the purpose of user satisfaction, they're doing it so they can sell more or for a higher price. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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@boomzilla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@yamikuronue Even if a company is paying for the purpose of user satisfaction, they're doing it so they can sell more or for a higher price. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Sure. The problem is nobody's doing it. If you give me a choice between "pay nothing for a shitty product" and "pay hundreds for a shitty product", and I pay nothing, and you conclude "nobody will pay for this product so why bother making it good", you're in error. I'd gladly pay for a good git GUI. My company just shelled out something like $300 for this shitty kraken product, but if there was a good option we'd have paid twice that without even blinking.
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@boomzilla said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@kt_ said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
especially since the claim went unchallenged for like a hundred posts
That's mostly laziness and too much apathy to RTFA, I think. I remember that paper being lambasted around here a while ago.
Yeah, I seem to remember reading about the retraction here, too. It was certainly a while ago, though.
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@heterodox said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Speaking of pronunciation, I had problems for almost a decade because I'd pronounce things wrong, simply because they were words I'd read but never said. But I knew those were the words that I really wanted to use because I knew they "fit" more than any of the others.
Ah yes, English. Only recently have I learned how "nonchalant" is pronounced.
Now, how shall I pronounce "mobile" today?
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@zecc said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
how shall I pronounce "mobile" today?
Isn't that just about whether you speak English (traditional) or English(simplified)?
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In late 90s I was in this programming course for kids for a couple of years. The software we used was called Baltazar; it was a C preprocessor and IDE (and some other tools like a sprite editor) that in its basic mode allowed you to control the a wizard on screen with simple commands. It's been decades but the basic syntax was something like this:
pplppprx(1,3)!The "play area" of the screen was divided into a grid. Each
pmeant "move one step forward in the direction you're facing",l= turn 90 degrees left (rwould be the same for right), andx(1,3)was "conjure the 3rd item on the 1st row (from a graphical list you could bring up in the editor)". So the wizard would start in the bottom left of the screen, move 2 steps forward, turn left (up), move 3 more steps, turn right again, and conjure a house or something. You could set properties to the conjured objects (passable/nonpassable etc.) and some of the premade exercises had mazes on the screen from the start, etc. The syntax had this cool visual representation of the program's flow - I don't remember it exactly, but it would look something like this:program _____________________________|___________________ part 1 part 2 pplpppr! some other commands!(Wow, that was annoying to format. Thankfully the provided IDE did that automatically.)
There was also another version aimed at younger kids, possibly even preschoolers, that used icons instead of text. (Googling a bit it seems there was an international version called Baltie, too. At least I think it's the same thing, it's definitely the same company.) The version I used was aimed at early elementary schoolers, about grades 3-5. You could switch from the "baltazar" move-based language what I believe was basically C except localized into my language, too, and use cycles, conditions, functions, arrays, strings, manipulate files on disk...
There were even programming competitions and some of the games the kids made (it was always games of course) were really impressive; I recall there was even a rudimentary "open world" game where you could walk around a city (with traffic that killed you if it ran into you) and solve puzzles in various buildings, and it was made by a 12 year old kid.
Unfortunately I can't find any useful screenshots of the actual IDE.
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@blek Well, here's a screenshot, but it doesn't show the basic mode:
http://czech-web.cz/~firma2xm/SGPSKOBR/prsluch.gif
It seems to be a hearing test - it generates tones from 0-20000 Hz in steps of 100 Hz and you're supposed to press a key when you stop hearing the tone. I think we did that example in the course, too. The part where it branches ("Volba") is equivalent to an if statement (decreasing or increasing tone frequency).
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@jaloopa said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
@heterodox said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
I had problems for almost a decade because I'd pronounce things wrong, simply because they were words I'd read but never said
I still do. My wife corrects me on some word I've used in the correct context but mangled the pronunciation on an almost weekly basis
Me too.
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@jaloopa said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
Isn't that just about whether you speak English (traditional) or English(simplified)?
A case can be made that the flags with those two options should be swapped around — or at least that the American flag should be with “English (Traditional)” and perhaps some other qualifier added for the English shown with the British flag.
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@gurth said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
perhaps some other qualifier added for the English shown with the British flag.
Complified?
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@gurth said in Actual... testing!? WITH USERS?!?!?!?:
A case can be made that the flags with those two options should be swapped around — or at least that the American flag should be with “English (Traditional)” and perhaps some other qualifier added for the English shown with the British flag.
Seems Traditional is right. We should have "Betterer"
