Hi Richard, On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 at 18:45, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz@gmail.com> wrote:
This is meant to be constructive, but won't seem that way at first.
Thanks for your feedback. I can tell you're being constructive by the detail you went into. It must have taken a good ten minutes to compose and in an environment where attention is a scarce resource, that is gold. I'll definitely file it for my own future reference.
(1) The sound track very nearly drove me away in the first few seconds. I'm deadly serious about that. I'm not on the spectrum, but my elder daughter is, and sensory sensitivities are very common amongst ASD people. I'm rather sensitive to noise myself. Now if the sound track were *relevant* to the message, I'd put up with it, but I can't for the life of me see any connection between the sound track banging away and what's happening on the screen.
Its easy to forget such considerations when they are outside our immediate experience. Thx for the heads up.
(2) Above all, it was a *missed opportunity*. Here was the chance to add a narration telling us what we are seeing and what it all *means*. Something not unlike Code Bullet, maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSW-5m8lRMs
The specifics are quite different. We don't have access to the teams in the same way, but I get your point. Something similar with a different slant should be possible - if the creative juices flow the right way. (3) I don't give a tinker's curse for the score. It's just a number without
any context. The scores for *all* the teams might be more interesting. The numbers that really matter are TIME, EFFORT, and SIZE. How long did it take each team? How much code did they end up with? How much were they able to re-use? How many false starts had to be thrown away?
Good points, but being the first time running such a competition, its not set up to gather that information. If a chance arose to do it, are there any further questions of interest to others?
(4) The other missed opportunity was the chance to show some of the Pharo IDE in action. Click on a cell, bring up the halo, explore the data structure, show some code, jump around in it.
Will try to find time to do this later on. As it is, this clip shows me
- unknown code - solving an unfamiliar problem - written by people I know nothing about - using unknown tools - with no evidence that Smalltalk helped in any way.
If I were a Blub programmer, I'd probably ignore this completely. At best, I'd look for the problem specification, then say "who cares, I can do that easily in Blub".
If you want to show that Smalltalk is the best thing since sliced cheese, you have to show that *Smalltalk* is relevant in some way.
Thanks for your constructive critque. cheers -ben
On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 at 03:53, Richard Kenneth Eng <horrido.hobbies@gmail.com> wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNyu-3Y2arg
This time, the teams must deal with Jump cells, Warp cells, and Death
cells. If you land on a Death cell, you die and the simulation terminates.
Next week is the most exciting round yet. Multiple teams will be
competing on the same board! This will look so damn cool on YouTube.
Richard