Randomness in Madeup
About 30% into writing tests for a piece of code, my energy deflates. When I consider how many more tests I have to write to thoroughly test my code, I am overwhelmed. The worst part about testing is that you can’t just tax the moving parts of your software the way someone like you would. […]
Madeup Workshop
Biography It all started with the school bus. I lived twelve miles from town, and every morning I got on the bus at 7 AM. I watched every other kid get picked up. In the afternoon, I watched every other kid get dropped off. At 4 PM, I was home. School started at 8 AM […]
Convert a C++ Exception Into a Java Exception
In Madeup, I needed an exception to propagate from C++ to Java to PHP. I was pretty certain the conventional exception mechanics wouldn’t support this, especially the leap from Java to PHP, but I think I’m wrong. On the C++ side of the JNI bridge, I catch the exception and then throw it back to Java […]
Wisconsin Teaching Fellowship Project Question
I’m participating in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program. This program aims to foster real scientific research on teaching and learning, an area that is typically snubbed by tenure committees at schools bigger than my own. Each fellow or scholar proposes a research question, deliberates with a team of others, spends a year studying the […]
Implicit Named Parameters?
In Learnable Programming, Bret Victor argues that to dispel the mysteries of source code we must show data in its context. One of the examples he suggests of offering context is to add a feature to IDEs: when a developer hovers over a parameter in source code, the IDE shows a message indicating the semantic […]
Madeup at the Phillips Library
Last Saturday, Madeup took its first step outside this building. The American Library Association designated this week as Teen Tech Week, and our local public library asked my department if we’d be interested in putting on a workshop for teenagers. I volunteered Madeup, despite its wobbly state. About 30 participants showed up, with half as […]
Some Starter Models
Madeup is going on the road for the first time tomorrow—at our local public library. Participants are going to create their own models and we’re going to try printing them. Since many models exhibit printing issues (too steep an overhang, intersecting geometry, non-manifoldness), we’ve generated a handful of objects that are well-behaved. Rook Hazmat X-Men […]
Madeup in a Browser
Finals week has afforded me a chance to think about something else for a while. Like getting the Madeup interpreter to run in a web browser! Thanks to the folks behind THREE.js and the Ace Editor, we’ve got a way to program and view 3-D models in a browser.
Madeup
Madeup is a language for making things up. Using commands for moving around, its speakers walk interesting paths through 3-D space and generate geometric models tracing the paths. The models may be viewed in any standard 3-D model viewer or sent to a 3-D printer. The language was designed for several reasons: To enable the creation […]
Closure Self-Reference in Madeup
Madeup is a language for expressing the construction of 3-D objects. It borrows heavily from Logo, with extra instructions for generating triangular meshes fitted around the stops the turtle makes. I’m very interested in making a RERL (the unpronounceable read-eval-render-loop) for Madeup that runs on mobile devices. Typing on mobile devices is not fun, so […]