Scratch

bharvey wrote:

soupoftomato wrote:

... Harry Scratcher ...

Fwiw, some of us set our browsers to always use a black background no matter what the page says.  Your sig doesn't look very legible against black!

When did I say that in this forum . . . 

And about the forum, I was bored.    So, I'll just let it wait until August. 

xly wrote:

But, on top of that, Byob would develop the idea (or the concept , or the technology ? ) of function-sharing.

You can do that by exporting a sprite that carries the functions with it, just like our tools sprite.  The sprite serves as a package mechanism.

shamrocker wrote:

bharvey wrote:

shadow_7283 wrote:

Will BYOB 3 include any improvments in speed?

BYOB 2.99 will probably (there is a last-minute speed improvement coming, but since it's not here yet I don't know how much it'll help) be slow as molasses.  The reason is that Scratch lists are stored in a way that's tuned for iteration rather than recursion, which is the cleanest way to think about many problems once you can define procedures.  We should be back to at least traditional Scratch speed in the real release in August.  We have some ideas about how to make BYOB 4 a lot faster, but otoh we're hoping that there won't have to be a BYOB 4 because the Scratch Team will adopt the idea of first class data.

2.99.007 isn't slow at all.    It's faster than Scratch!

Maybe. But the problem is that BYOB 3 allows you to do MORE. So with features like "atomic" BYOB is actually pretty slow.

Wouldn't the [blocks]<glide( 1 )secs to x   1 )y   1[/blocks] be an atomic block?

Last edited by ScratchReallyROCKS (2010-05-27 18:12:58)

The-Whiz wrote:

bharvey wrote:

The-Whiz wrote:

does BYOB 2.99.013 support connections with computers that aren't in your network?

I've never actually used the mesh network feature!  But I should think that's more up to whoever administers your network than up to BYOB.  The problem would be firewalls in the way, right?

You should try it, it can be handy. 

But back to my question: Usually when I host a mesh, I get an option that says "Accept incoming connections?" When I click OK, it asks for the admin name and pass, and since I don't know them I can't do anything about the Firewall.

xly wrote:

For example my exportable MYFUNCTION calls FOREACH, which call MAP which call ...nothing else from Byob toolbox.

Oh yeah, good point.  Okay, we'll try to invent libraries.

bharvey wrote:

ScratchReallyROCKS wrote:

Wouldn't the [blocks]<glide( 1 )secs to x   1 )y   1[/blocks] be an atomic block?

Good point.  All the built-in Scratch blocks are by definition "atomic."  But the ones that take a long time arrange to allow other things to happen meanwhile.  (You could have picked ASK <> AND WAIT as an even more dramatic example!)

In the case of GLIDE, my guess is that the only work that really happens as part of the atomic block time is computing the sprite's velocity -- speed and direction -- and setting up an asynchronous motion task that isn't part of the block's thread.  You can see this most clearly in the sound blocks that don't wait for the sound to finish; clearly the entire playing of the sound, which can last for minutes, doesn't stop everything, or even delay the thread with the PLAY block.

But really this atomic/non-atomic distinction applies only to custom blocks.

Would it be different if you put it in a launch block?

bharvey wrote:

The-Whiz wrote:

When I click OK, it asks for the admin name and pass, and since I don't know them I can't do anything about the Firewall.

Right, you can't, and neither can BYOB.  That's the whole idea of a firewall -- it protects you against Bad Programs reading a virus over the net, or sending your credit card numbers over the net, etc.  If you want BYOB to be declared a Good Program, you have to take it up with your sysadmin, not us!

(Sorry for not answering the first time, but I interpreted the above paragraph as indicating that you understood all this!  So I wasn't sure what to say...)

But if I DID declare BYOB as a good program, would it be able to connect with computers outside my network, if they had also declared BYOB as a good program?

Sorry I have to keep bothering you about this... 

The-Whiz wrote:

But if I DID declare BYOB as a good program, would it be able to connect with computers outside my network, if they had also declared BYOB as a good program?

Sorry I have to keep bothering you about this... 

No bother, it's great to know people are using BYOB!

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.  The whole point of the Internet Protocol is that you're supposed to be able to connect to anyone anywhere.  But I'm not really equipped to do an experiment, so let's wait for Jens to come home and answer this authoritatively.

EDIT:  One possible trouble: Not only your sysadmin, but your ISP's sysadmin, and your ISP's ISP's sysadmin, etc., all have to let the traffic through their firewalls.

Skype manages to finesse all this somehow, but it takes them enormous effort and probably violates the fine print of everyone's agreement with their ISPs.  If nothing else works they send the traffic over port 80 (http) -- i.e., they pretend to be a browser.  This is easy for traffic initiated by your computer but not so easy for incoming asynchronous traffic; my guess is that they just send a fake request every few seconds to a special URL set up just for you.

Last edited by bharvey (2010-05-28 23:29:21)

@bharvey

1 - The Koch functions, obviously, works if you create the serie of k1,k2,k3 functions, but not if the same function calls itself with the same names of arguments. I continue to explore. By the way does Byob provides the mechanism (Lisp Lambda ?) allowing to create the script of a function inside a function , according the contetx, (define koch1  as a list of instructions) and run it inside the same function ?

2 - Byob already provides the system of function-sharing which seems promising. Your toolbox is a good example of this. I had not clearly understood that a sprite ( this word is not in my dictionary) was a collection of "turtles" + a collection of (loose) instructions linked together by broadcast messages. Thus, a sprite can contain Byob functions as well + turtles if necessary...and can be exported/imported. Good point. A

The BYOB web site now has a link to the paper that Jens and I are presenting at Constructionism 2010 in Paris in August.  People who've been hanging out here won't learn anything new from it, but it's a reference that those of you who are academics can cite.

I implemented first-class timers with this project. You can pause and reset them, but the caveat is that you can't use the "reset timer" block. By the way, I am finding that BYOB struggles to detect keyboard input when a custom atomic block is continually being called. Try pressing the spacebar in the above project...it should pause the timer instance but it rarely does.

Last edited by fullmoon (2010-05-29 17:59:11)