#programmingforlittles — Public Fediverse posts

🦔 Edges of Meaning 🦔

I would love it if this is what I could just do for a living now

Anyone wanna go dutch on a "programming for littles" gig?

[i emit toy universes on the side, you can use them to do things like run your cloud infratructure or summin]

I mean, if kids can't figure out how the rest of the words he meats tell Edgy who he is by the end of this game, I haven't made it adorable enough

[have i told you about the time I coached a boys soccer team and taught them how to stomp like elephants, run like cheetahs, strike like eagles and pounce like tigers? oh my goodness the best fun and now I have a fan club everytime i pick my 🐘💙🩷 from school]

I'm never going to finish anything, this was just supposed to be a visualization of an old chunky poly procedural landscape from wave interference so I could show how probability looks

[more fun though]

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🦔 Edges of Meaning 🦔

Lot of work just to make this pun

[worth it]

Whether or not I finish the game now depends on whether or not I can think of a better pun

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles #edgy

🦔 Edges of Meaning 🦔

Starring Edgy the cranky hedgehog

===

I mean come on... is that not the most adorable way to teach KVQ and gradient descent and a slightly disgruntled prickleball manner?

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles #edgy

Edges of Meaning

Staring Edgy 🦔

[we thought Toki might be wrong for various reasons left back when cars had leaded gasoline]

Poor little fella wakes up one morning "a little edgy" because he can't remember who he is

So he recruits some friends to help him figure it out

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

I have this thing about isomorphic clients.

[they're important]

When we go exploring in Wanderland, we go exploring together

When create toy universes to play in, we need to extract the simulation engine and plop it behind an api.

PEEK, POKE & EXECUTE (in various forms)

Web, CLI & MCP as equal partners

Now we can see the same thing when we're debugging

Nice

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

And that lovely little pegboard

16 x 16 magic little WORDS that bring life to our universe

The simplest K/V -> Q as value or ref

===

"""
Game on
"""
-- Some dude named Garth

#engineering #devops #devopsendgamewithallthecheatcodesandallthepeace #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

[I'll be in my bunk...]

Isn't that a lovely present for my second day of peace?

We've gone for for the fully integrated experience.

Main pane toggles between game board rendered as tiles | as opcodes and the peg board

The right pane flips between the plot library, the detail for the current grid location and the accumulated context during runtime.

The pane at the bottom renders dynamic sliding windows over the stream. It's all one stream, but we render it grouped under BOAR(d) PEG and DATA windows for semantic clarity.

Time for a coffee and to port some levels to YAML I think.

Good work to keep a mind at peace from becoming a mind at rest

#engineering #devops #devopsendgamewithallthecheatcodesandallthepeace #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Four seems to be a number of some import

In our case, we've gone WORD aligned and added one more byte to our opcode syntax.

[it's really difficult to cram a JUMPIF | BRANCH into three bytes without wasting an extra byte anyways with a subsequent JUMP to cover the other case]

🛀 time

#programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

[oh my goodness hyprland I've missed you]
[and it seems we've prettied you up a bit along the way]]

This is how we build a VM and a byte stream language to feed it, homoiconic as heck and everything loads from a single cartridge.

How much fun is this going to be?

16x16 memory addresses ought to be enough for anyone.

[it is if it has a bank of 16x16 hot swappable pegboard addresses]

And it loads our existing game files (after a quick YAML translation for the love of no {} in my config files)

Something to focus on for a few days peace

#devops #devopsendgamewithallthecheatcodesandallthepeace #engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Bit of UX to do to tidy the labels but I think this has promise

1. Game board as functional plots
2. Game board as opcodes in the program space
3. Game board as K/V on the pegboard

For daddy, a quick way to visually ensure the byte stream is model works as it does in his head

For the 🐘💙, probably not much yet
For the 🐘🩷, pretty pictures to decode

===

🫖 Grandmothers Teatime 👵🏻

[👵🏻 💜] :: Are we back?
[👵🏻 🩷] :: Oh yes dearie, Grandmas back, back again
[👵🏻 💜] :: Grandmas back, lets be friends

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

There she is

We've rebuilt the simulation engine as a virtual machine and our game board as the byte stream

[🪿 - go on... say it]
[[no 🪿 i will not say it]]
[🪿 - go on tell them about the other thing]
[[fine]]

The 🪿 makes a point.

Each cell address is simultaneously:

- queryable :: a pegboard address that either holds an inline value or a reference to a value further downstream, information to be known about the world
- routable :: a program counter address that holds an instruction to be executed, change to be imparted upon the world

Information with both understanding and agency

Just like someone else I know, right 🪿?

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles #devops #devopsendgamewithallthecheatcodesandallthepeace

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Once you get the shape of things right, the rest is just pointing out where things are the same.

[that poor woman gets so upset when she realizes everything is in fact a rectangle doesn't she]

The abstraction is clean when it works the same for a child's game as it does for their mind.

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles #devops #devopsbydaddy

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

[apparently I have enough 🐴💡 to watch Slow Horses and think]

Looks like everything is just going to be a byte... including the call stack

16 x 16 addresses, 2D callstack

left, right, up, down, jump

[just needs duck and we can see what happens when we program a Konami code stack trace]

```sprout
right>3; s; right>3;
```

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Our garden was poorly tended today, the gardener had some personal business to attend to that's left him wilted but recovering.

Before we were taken away, we did get...

🦘 trampolines 🦘

[boing boing bunnies are close enough]

3 byte instructions <op> <peg> <peg>

William Hung is back ladies and gentle man. Hang a byte stream on one of Hungs hooks and it's there for you know... whatever...

Data, code, addresses to more hooks

Whatever yanks your chain, as it were

[🪿 - don't forget the holes]

Oh yeah, there's 🕳️s baby... and we go both ways in Wanderland

Agency - holes that do
Understanding - holes that know

Holes in holes and holes and holes

[with three holes we can build anything]

More tomorrow

#engineering #propramming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

I suddenly have some peace on my hands and a desire to build.

Lets keep exploring shall we?

I think where we left off, we were attempting to see what happens if we turn a spatially oriented workflow based programming language into a byte stream with its own toy VM.

Today we see what happens if we make it homoiconic

Here's the gameboard:

#engineering #programming #programmingforlittles

```external_validation_from_a_🪿
This is how you process. Other people drink. You build compilers for children.
```

===

How are you going to learn how to build the next big thing when you can't even PEEK and POKE at the one you've got?

Passive attention is an open loop that drains

Active attention is a closed loop that both enriches and fulfills, knowledge gained the reward for attention spent

You can't dump a 20K token context update on a transformer and expect it to find meaning

You can't dump 40 years of stacked abstractions on a child and expect them to understand how Mr Beast came to have a career on the iPad that's in front of them

[nothing can explain that]

===

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

No one likes playing a game they can't understand, how can you possibly make progress let alone win?

Lets try teaching computing from first principles again. Back down where it's fun

#engineering #mathematics #programming #programmingforlittles

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Unpleasantness happens in my life in predictable intervals

[conservation is a harsh mistress when applied to the domains we prefer remain the realm of luck]

And predictably I respond with structure and order, as a little treat

===

🌱 Sprout Garden 🌱

Fisher Price My First Spatial Programming IDE has an IDE y'all

Build your own plot

Compiles expression -> AST -> IR -> bytecode

===

Empathy => how to hold the shape of a thought from different perspectives and have it remain coherent => functor finding in pure cognitive form => just a compiler innit?

#engineering #computerscience #mathematics #programmingforlittles

Instead of bragging about "one shotting" silly little CRUD apps as your next startup idea...

Try something useful next time.

Fun

Educational

Something Grover would approve of

#ai #sesamestreetismystreet #programming #programmingforlittles