Hedy: Textual programming made easy

Aren't all the SIGPLAN conferences recorded now? At any rate, her talks were recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrUh5AgIYKE

https://youtu.be/-Br66SUjsdQ?t=12103

(I was also at SPLASH24 and thought she gave great talks. :) )

I wonder how much projects like Hedy appeals to adults over kids.

Egalitarian, multilingual coding sells well to parents. Children, so I hear, just want to make Minecraft mods or Roblox games.

Seems like a tension between the customer and the user.

I'm French too, and when I was young, I learnt the Basic language before learning English (by reading Basic programs already available on our computer).

So I was able to write FOR … THEN … ELSE blocks without even knowing what the keywords meant (I just know what they did to the program). One day, I explained to my father what I was writing, and I read out loud FOR … "TEN" … "ELCE" (with a strong French accent), and he corrected me by pronouncing the words correctly ("FOR … THEN … ELSE"). I was shocked: "how do you know?" (he knew nothing about Basic or even programming).

I learnt that day that "for", "then" and "else" were not just keywords in the Basic language, but they were actually real words in English.

Still, it's nice to engage with folks on their own terms, and not just blindly assume they'll want to work in English all their life.

I kind of miss the early 2000's, where a bunch of pretty well-known French and Belgian academics were publishing source code in their own languages (#define to remap keywords and all)

I’m a native English speaker, but I have several dev friends from Latin America.

I remember asking them whether it would be useful if they could use Spanish words in their syntax, and they all pretty much said the same as you.

For the anecdote, my first introduction to programming (and to computers in general) was in french schools with Thomson TO7, and the language used was Logo, with french keywords. But I agree, english keyword are not really the difficult point when learning to program (for countries with latin alphabet)

I'm opposite: I thought the multi-lingual aspect seemed nice but the echo command immediately bothered me

That is one of the coolest results from Hedy, that these engaging learning paths have a constant acceleration to them, so before you know it, you are juggling while riding a unicycle. You undertand something to the core when you have built it yourself.

In a way it is a perfect (ugh) example of constructivist learning theory, Hedy itself is a constructivist learning exercise in how to teach.

Lego Mindstorms were inspired by Seymour Papert, himself the creator of the Logo programming language and whom he took inspiration from Piaget the psychologist whose work on feedback loops creating core knowledge.

This is an example of how to search using phind https://www.phind.com/search?cache=pti09n13qtsxahmn5zra8yjk

I don't know the one that shipped from Microsoft, but I'm going to assume it's goal wasn't to teach people how to code but rather empower non-programmers to code. Starting from that, I don't see the two would be similar.

Also Excel functions are translated based on your region. Which I find annoying, because most learning resources and references are in English, and English function names don't work in other regional settings.

I know several programmers who don't speak any english and can understand the things well enough.

I think this is a valid project and while most programmers I know eventually understand a bit of what the identifier of english mean, the concepts are much better explained in their native language. They can much better translate it later when moving to a "serious" programming language or even to Excel or something like that.

Excel functions are also translated, so stuff like that is really helpful even if you aren't going to become a programmer.

And for OG Perl, Damian Conway gives us classical Latin!

  use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
  
  adnota Illud Cribrum Eratothenis
  
  maximum tum val inquementum tum biguttam tum stadium egresso scribe.
  da meo maximo vestibulo perlegementum.
  
  maximum comementum tum novumversum egresso scribe.
  meis listis conscribementa II tum maximum da.
  dum damentum nexto listis decapitamentum fac
    sic
      lista sic hoc tum nextum recidementum cis vannementa listis da.
      dictum sic deinde cis tum biguttam tum stadium tum cum nextum
      comementum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
    cis

You are evaluating this as a tool that is intended to train people up to being professional software developers.

It's not!

It's instead intended to give every child in the world, regardless of inclination, some first-hand experience in programming computers. Some of these may go on to become professional software engineers, and if they do it will be time enough to become proficient in the common lexicon. Even if they don't, at least they've gotten a better understanding of these machines that inescapably pervade our lives. And kids that wouldn't have thought they'd have an interest in programming get an easy-entry exposure and may decide to pursue it professionally after all.

Given that that's the audience, the goal is to take away any barrier to the essential skill to learn, which in this case is writing instructions for an unthinking machine.

Kids that already know they love programming and are/were willing to do whatever it takes to learn it (i.e., probably nearly everyone on this forum, including myself), are not the audience! Those kids will make it one way or another. Hedy is for all the other kids out there.

> it's sad that some well-intentioned people make them skip what cannot be skipped.

I don't see this as a move to skip learning English terms for programming concepts, it's a move to reorder.

Starting with Python requires kids to start learning computational thinking simultaneous with learning the English terms for computational constructs. Sure, there aren't many terms to learn, and sure, in some cases (but far from all!) the English word isn't a great mnemonic even for English-speaking children, but neither one of those facts is a good explanation for why teaching a few foreign-language words isn't just accidental complexity in the early stages! And if it's accidental complexity, why not put it off for later?

The whole premise of Hedy is to gradually add complexity in levels, and yeah, that means that throughout the design (not just in the localization) there are some aspects of each level that become redundant as you move on to later levels. But if that's what you're criticizing, you're not criticizing just the fact that it's localized, you're criticizing the entire pedagogical philosophy of Hedy and of most educational institutions.

Educators in general prioritize breaking a concept down into manageable chunks, even if that means teaching some things in a way that isn't perfectly applicable in the real world. Hedy does that for programming, and if you don't like it then your beef is with the entire educational philosophy, not the localization.

Hedy is designed for use in classrooms, and reaches many kids who otherwise would not have tried programming at all. See it as a stepping stone towards programming rather than a great language.

Disclaimer: I've been involved with the project (in a tiny way), and am a fan.

I don't know about the US, for the first serious second languages courses in France happen sometimes at the very late primary school, or early secondary school.

But you might want to teach very simple programming concepts before that. You end up using programming as "applied math" and "applied reading / writing".

It's okay. Not all of them will learn programming. Just like it might be usefull to call some angles A in math class, before we learn enough greek to call them omega like all Physical Engineers.

And if they get serious, yes, they will learn english.

(Now that I think of it, I'm pretty old, and I grew up during the "Computer Science for all" years, so I had some very early english and some very early LOGO classes taught the same year. And I'm pretty sure the LOGO went first. Ooooh, memories.)

Agree with most of that. yet, I think there is a lot of value in intuitively understanding the 'fors' and the 'ifs' in a way that's different than a combination letters.

Always reminding yourself that 'if' means 'jezeli' (or paste if in your lang) before writing is an extra cognitive load, quite annoying for a kid in the age of dopamine disruption.

Is that problem huge? Don't think so.

Moreover, in the age of LLMs every child can have an infinitely patient assistant explain them how to do things in any mainstream language. Even before LLMs, the ability to Google something was proportional to the popularity of the language. When we teach children math, we do not teach obscure boutique notation, we teach what everyone knows, even though there are alternatives that would certainly work better for teaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)#Tu...

You can select the language drop down and follow one of the tutorials

https://www.hedy.org/hedy#story

https://www.hedy.org/hedy/10?language=ar&keyword_language=ar...

At the top left is a control panel that toggles base language for the language keywords. Or what it appears to me. Is that what you are looking for? You could try the exercise and see if it supports both.

It looks like you can definitely program entirely in Arabic with English inside of Hedy, I am not sure if any of the exercises are declaring new keywords