Substrate

“@jckarter @kylebshr I’d caution against judging any language’s teaching potential via toy examples of string manipulation that never happen in real life. More important is how the learning curve progresses into day 2, day 20, day 200.”

“What I love about my son’s drawings is that he does not really care about them once he’s finished them. To him, they are dead artifacts, a scrap of by-product from his learning process. (For me, they’re tiny masterpieces to hang on the fridge.)”

A thing that affords play, then, is a thing that suggests playful uses; a thing that naturally guides its user towards a playful state of mind. ​ The very existence of a reliable undo command is an open invitation to engage in playful experimentation A canvas or sketchbook serves as an “external imagination”, where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously reacting to what’s in front of him. ​ Consider what it’s like to play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Now consider what it’s like to write, say, a shell script for the first time. In both scenarios, your challenge involves learning how to manipulate a wildly complex system in order to achieve a desired outcome. But so far, I’ve yet to meet anyone who had a harder time learning Super Mario Bros. than learning to program ​ an unfortunate trend in contemporary games is to spell out every detail in a hand-holding “tutorial” session at the outset of a game – unfortunate because it shows both a great deal of contempt for the player’s intuition and a lack of confidence in the designer’s own design. but more than that, it’s a design failure because it tells the player the rules instead of allowing her to learn them. ​ sharp relief Why, then, do people learn to program through tutorials and exercises that tell rather than show? Perhaps because the tools, languages, and environments embraced by modern programming practice are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to play. When you first launch Super Mario Bros., you’re greeted by an engaging, reactive first level designed to guide you gently into the world of the game. When you first launch the Unix shell, you’re confronted by an empty, inscrutable command line that will reject, with a tersely worded error message, almost anything you choose to type.

As a technical challenge, Bootstrap just isn’t very interesting. It’s trying to provide a collection of components — components like modals, tooltips, and grids that have been around the Web forever…