Programming Has Teeth

I think, that all teenagers must learn programming, and their first language should be JavaScript, the language of the web.

Programs like Node-RED, p5.js and electronjs fiddle (fiddle tutorial), make for a really powerful introduction to programming.

It is rare, to have such a beautiful start.

I wrote a neat program today that allows for manipulating gradients, to gently shape the look and feel of windows, captions, status and menu bars, and buttons.

It is for my own visual programming language, which is similar to desktop operating systems.

Except in my program, you can pan and zoom in or out, and applications can be connected together with wires.

It is nothing new, nothing revolutionary, but it is necessary for many reasons.

I once had this really cool day dream, where upon clicking a PI symbol on a web page.

The web page shrank, revealing it self to be just a window, and behind it sit many other windows.

Revealing the mechanism behind the now minimized website, neat little windows showing how data is loaded.

Connections to other services, and even a more capable program to manage user’s own profile.

I have since create many such meta-programming environments, learning what to do, and what to navigate around.

For example, my program will have a mode where windows can’t be dragged live, instead, a much faster outline, or just a circle will be dragged.

And once dropped, the window will then jump there, this should allow a snappy UI, on cheap single board computers.

And I am constantly being pulled towards creating a file system in the web page, almost with directories and files.

Though here for the purpose of manipulating data structures, and generating a kind of a report, when things change.

So a button in a window would be represented by a folder with some files, and if that button folder gets deleted, the tree comes to life to update a bunch of stuff.

It will update a UI editor, a preview of that window, and even the incomplete but running application.

I call it a bubbling signal tree, for now, meaning, that a lot of stuff will happen automatically, bubble from the button up.

Automatic behavior is a big deal here, because tree recursion is hard.

In other areas of programming automatic behaviors are seen, as a form of intelligence.

There is so much to inspire here, so much to explore.

I don’t mean to make lives more complicated, programming replacement for ineffective education.

Programming, is not a hobby like star gazing, or 3D printing, it is a super fast way out of the worst of poverty, if not all of it.

Equipped with knowledge of programming, makes a person unafraid of poverty, makes them stronger.

And unlike all the other pursuits, results in the world of programming are instant.

You learn every day, you dream up ideas all the time, and before you know it…

You are purring all the building blocks together, to create something new.

The politicians are not going to repair the world, but learning for real can go around that.

It is perhaps even better than relying on other peoples honesty, programming leads towards a great intellectual independence.

And eventually even becomes a tool for learning and research, allowing for simulation and automation, and so much more.