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dimkir / SocialSketch

Processing PDE tool for fetching processing sketche sources code from Twitter and viewing in PDE
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Maybe rename tool as "Tweet2Sketch" or "Tweet to Sketch"? #2

Open hamoid opened 11 years ago

hamoid commented 11 years ago

Currently the tool name shown in the menu is "==tweet2sketch tool==". Maybe it would look better in the menu if the name followed the naming standard :)

dimkir commented 11 years ago

I totally agree with that. That was just a temporary solution to put this name. I will fix that.

However I was thinking what would be the appropriate name for the tool? I was hoping that the tool can somehow motivate people to remix sketches, code more, and have more fun.

Something like "Sketch modder".. but this name isn't very much of a hit... later I made this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwXAWAQEErE

and the name "Sketch DJ" appeared. What do you think?

hamoid commented 11 years ago

I think Sketch Modder and Sketch DJ are more catchy names, but less descriptive.

As the tool links P5 and Twitter, I think names like TweetASketch, TweetSketch, SketchTweet, Sketch140, SketchOneForty, MiniSketch, TinySketch indicate better what it is about.

Don't you think it's important to give some kind of hint about the size limitation? Or do you envision using the tool in ways that do not relate to Twitter?

dimkir commented 11 years ago

@hamoid

I renamed it to "Tweet-A-Sketch" as you suggested.

image

As to the question:

Don't you think it's important to give some kind of hint about the size limitation? Or do you envision using the tool in ways that do not relate to Twitter?

That's an open topic of discussion. I believe that size-limitation is definately a challenge. And it's an interesting brain teaser. And the visual effects which you have produced in your tweets are definately amazing for this size of code. However, everytime I think about tweeting sketches, I ask myself: will it serve "typical processing user"? Processing is used to teach people, beginners, and they're looking for fun. IMHO for them making something what "looks good" is already a challenge. So for them for example tweaking your sketch and buliding something cool on top of it whilst trying to constrain it within 143 chars may be a frustrating task.

My second concern about "typical processing user" is based on reading code of processing sketches on openprocessing.org. The code quality of the "average processing sketch" is just horrible. I have rarely seen worse code that one which is available on openprocessing.org. Despite visual effects they do are amazing, the code quality (usage of private variables, separation of concerns, following Single Responsibility principle, reducing coupling, modular buliding for reusability) is bad. So IMHO the main gap is "programming thinking", rather than "mastering the syntax". And this "programming thinking" may be developed by collaborating with others, resharing their code and coding together.

Third concern is that "Processing" now seems a bit like "tinkering alone in the garage" type of thing. Everyone is trying to make their sketches at home by themesleves, occasionally posting questions to forum. But if you look at the statistics on the forum "Share your work", then amount of views in that thread is waaaay lower than in any other thread. This statistics almost says "we don't really care about works of others, we just want to learn ourselves".

I believe that there should be a tool which somehow allows people to "collaborate" and make them excited about trying things and maybe working together. And I am not sure how 143 char limitation may suit the abovementioned needs.

hamoid commented 11 years ago

The name looks good :)

You raise very interesting topics.

1) I agree that this is not for the average user, and few people would enjoy spending two hours as I do just to write those 140 characters.

2) I also agree with the code being low quality in openprocessing.org That's tricky, because I believe Processing attracts the kind of people who are more interested in the beauty of the results than the correctness and maintainability of code. I only truly understood the importance of that when I worked in a company and had to deal with half million lines of messy code. It's hard to defend good code in front of people who just write 50 line programs. All those design patterns and other techniques feel like making things ridiculously complicated when writing small programs. Tweet programs definitely don't help in this context. Actually, as I wrote in http://funprogramming.org/p5tweets/ "you often must break all rules of 'good programming'" when writing these. I also ask people to "please don't learn programming from these tweets :)".

3) I also agree that there is no real collaborative learning going on. People just ask a question and then continue on their own.

From these points what I see is that there maybe should be 1) a Tweet-a-sketch tool for doing crazy little messy programs and 2) something new trying to solve the points you raise. Maybe a website like http://sccode.org/ exists for SuperCollider. Do you want to build http://p5code.org ? :)