[xiaomai]

I taught a high-school Intro to CS course last year with the TEALs program (https://tealsk12.org). I was very unenthusiastic when I heard that the first semester was taught using Snap, but I was wrong. Snap is a pretty awesome way to introduce someone to programming (much more powerful and reliable than other block-based programming environments I've tinkered with like the Kano kit).

The one really terrible thing about the current iteration of Snap (that I think would be trivial to solve?) is that you have to remember to save your work. I don't think that's a normal thing for people to think about on the web in this day and age, and I have seen many students (and my own children) lose large amounts of work due to this. It's extremely discouraging.

Other than that though, the snap language/environment is quite nice.

[cycomachead]

Autosave is not exactly trivial, but it's definitely on the list. I do agree it's something incredibly useful!

(Doing it right also can incur some costs, and that's something we would need funding for...)

[quickthrower2]

Local storage might be a lifesaver here. Just in case someone forgets to save offer auto recovery. This can be done client side with no server costs.

[cycomachead]

Trust me, I know. But even here we run into issues, such as projects over the local storage limit, and the fact that (well, until COVID...sigh), a non-trivial number of students were in computer labs that contained programs like deep freeze making anything local storage based headache inducing as a means of support.

[quickthrower2]

Thanks. Would you say you need more contributors? And if you do what are you needing? Coders? Project Managers? Designers? Writers?

[cycomachead]

Depends on what you're doing, but coding is probably the obstacle. There's about 4 of us working various amounts of part time.

In the case of auto-save, there's a lot of unsettled design trade-offs, and other needs keep coming up. But if you're curious, you're welcome to check out the GitHub: snap-cloud/snapCloud is the backend, and jmoenig/snap is the main IDE.

[quickthrower2]

Yeah as a beginner at open source contributing (but not development) I'd be looking to fix tiny bugs first anyway!

[xiaomai]

Good point, I was definitely too flippant about the amount of work involved. Glad to hear it's on the list though!

[enricozb]

I thought the message broadcasting and asynchronous behavior of Snap is really cool, specifically how sprites can have multiple code blocks each responding to messages or events.

I'm actually listening to a TEALS meeting right now! Funny to see it on HN.

[dvdkhlng]

I can second that, I have seen people frustrated after loosing work in Snap! by missing to save. But then that's maybe also a lesson people ought to learn early-on when creating stuff on the computer: safe early and create backups :)