Majelika

Its time for another technology tip, and this one is actually surprisingly easy!  If PowerPoint is your go-to program for creating teacher resources then youll love this one!



More than half of you voted for this in the poll, but the other options were definitely still contenders!  Dont forget to vote on next weeks poll!


Heres the tutorial!



For next weeks poll, Im going to add how to make easy page borders in Microsoft Word!  Heres an example of one....

I just love the look of italic text!  I love that it makes things stand out without making them in your face like bold does.  Its a nice simple way to accentuate something.

Well... if you use italic text in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, or if you use it on Blogger, this tip will save you a little bit of time!

This is a super fun tip... I could have used it back when I did my student teaching in 2nd grade!  It would have been perfect to go along with my lesson plans for the students animal research projects!  Anyhow... this week Ill be writing about how to make google search only specific websites!




If you want to know how to add that code to your blog, you can check out my previous tutorial here:




For next weeks tutorial, Ill be adding how to make your own bunting banner!

This weeks technology tutorial is one that is surprisingly very easy... how to add another websites photo to your blog (without HTML!).  I love using this trick when I do linky parties or when I link to someone elses blog (if they dont have the HTML code poster for a blogger button, that is!)









For next weeks poll, Ill add another blogger option... how to add a facebook "like" box to your sidebar (look at my side bar for an example!)  Then your blog followers can click one button on your blog to become a follower on facebook!

Its Tuesday again, so obviously its time for another technology tutorial!  This one is definitely one of my favorite... how to make a collage of pictures in any shape you want!


This poll won by a pretty large margin, but there were definitely some other contenders... itll be interesting to see what wins next week!


Now, onto the tutorial!  This tutorial uses the program Shape Collage, which you can download by clicking that link.







I have so many ideas for how I want to use this program in the classroom this year!  Primarily, I want to make a collage of photos of my students in the shape of the Cat in the Hats hat... but I think it has tons of other uses as well!

My students always seem to struggle with the "Which one does not belong?" questions on a test, despite tons of practice.  Im thinking I can make cute photo collages to use for this activity... for example, using all pictures of winter items in the shape of a winter hat, with a summer image placed in as well.  I think the kids will have a blast playing "I Spy" to look for the picture that doesnt belong... plus this shape will give them a hint as to the category it belongs in, which would make a great introduction point!

How do you think youll use this in your classroom?

As for next weeks poll, I did promise last week that Id add how to add HTML code to a blog post.  Im excited to see which one wins this time!

Every now and then, I stumble across a programming language that does something so different that it changes how I think about coding. In this post, I want to share some of my favorite finds.

This is not your grandmas "functional programming will change the world!" blog post: this list is much more esoteric. Id wager most readers havent heard of the majority of the languages and paradigms below, so I hope you have as much fun learning about these new concepts as I did.

Note: I have only minimal experience with most of the languages below: I find the ideas behind them fascinating, but claim no expertise in them, so please point out any corrections and errors. Also, if youve found any new paradigms and ideas not covered here, please share them!

Update: this post hit the front page of r/programming and HN. Thank you for the great feedback! Ive added some corrections below.

Concurrent by default

Example languages: ANI, Plaid

Lets kick things off with a real mind bender: there are programming languages out there that are concurrent by default. That is, every line of code is executed in parallel!

For example, imagine you wrote three lines of code, A, B, and C:

In most programming languages, A would execute first, then B, and then C. In a language like ANI, A, B, and C would all execute at the same time!

Control flow or ordering between lines of code in ANI is merely a side effect of explicit dependencies between lines of code. For example, if B had a reference to a variable defined in A, then A and C would execute at the same time, and B would execute only after A finished.

Lets look at an example in ANI. As described in the tutorial, ANI programs consists of "pipes" and "latches" that are used to manipulate streams and data flows. The unusual syntax is tough to parse, and the language seems dead, but the concepts are pretty interesting.

Heres a "Hello World" example in ANI:

In ANI terminology, we are sending the "Hello, World!" object (a string) to the std.out stream. What happens if we send another string to std.out?

Both of these lines of code execute in parallel, so they could end up in any order in the console. Now, look what happens when we introduce a variable on one line and reference it later:

The first line declares a "latch" (latches are a bit like variables) called s that contains a string; the second line sends the text "Hello, World!" to s; the third line "unlatches" s and sends the contents to std.out. Here, you can see ANIs implicit program sequencing: since each line depends on the previous one, this code will execute in the order it is written.

The Plaid language also claims to support concurrency by default, but uses a permissions model, as described in this paper, to setup control flow. Plaid also explores other interesting concepts, such as Typestate-Oriented Programming, where state changes become a first class citizen of the language: you define objects not as classes, but as a series of states and transitions that can be checked by the compiler. This seems like an interesting take on exposing time as a first class language construct as discussed in Rich Hickeys Are we there yet talk.

Multicore is on the rise and concurrency is still harder than it should be in most languages. ANI and Plaid offer a fresh a fresh take on this problem that could lead to amazing performance gains; the question is whether "parallel by default" makes concurrency easier or harder to manage.

Update: the description above captures the basic essence of ANI and Plaid, but I used the terms "concurrent" and "parallel" interchangeably, even though they have different meanings. See Concurrency Is Not Parallelism for more info.

Dependent types


Example languages: Idris, Agda, Coq

Youre probably used to type systems in languages like C and Java, where the compiler can check that a variable is an integer, list, or string. But what if your compiler could check that a variable is "a positive integer", "a list of length 2", or "a string that is a palindrome"?

This is the idea behind languages that support dependent types: you can specify types that can check the value of your variables at compile time. The shapeless library for Scala adds partial, experimental support (read: probably not ready for primetime) for dependent types to Scala and offers an easy way to see some examples.

Here is how you can declare a Vector that contains the values 1, 2, 3 with the shapeless library:

This creates a variable l1 whos type signature specifies not only that its a Vector that contains Ints, but also that it is a Vector of length 3. The compiler can use this information to catch errors. Lets use the vAdd method in Vector to perform a pairwise addition between two Vectors:

The example above works fine because the type system knows both Vectors have length 3. However, if we tried to vAdd two Vectors of different lengths, wed get an error at compile time instead of having to wait until run time!

Shapeless is an amazing library, but from what Ive seen, its still a bit rough, only supports a subset of dependent typing, and leads to fairly verbose code and type signatures. Idris, on the other hand, makes types a first class member of the programming language, so the dependent type system seems much more powerful and clean. For a comparison, check out the Scala vs Idris: Dependent Types, Now and in the Future talk:


Formal verification methods have been around for a long type, but were often too cumbersome to be usable for general purpose programming. Dependent types in languages like Idris, and perhaps even Scala in the future, may offer lighter-weight and more practical alternatives that still dramatically increase the power of the type system in catching errors. Of course, no dependent type system can catch all errors due to to ineherent limitations from the halting problem, but if done well, dependent types may be the next big leap for static type systems.

Concatenative languages

cat

Example languages: Forth, cat, joy

Ever wonder what it would be like to program without variables and function application? No? Me neither. But apparently some folks did, and they came up with concatenative programming. The idea is that everything in the language is a function that pushes data onto a stack or pops data off the stack; programs are built up almost exclusively through functional composition (concatenation is composition).

This sounds pretty abstract, so lets look at a simple example in cat:

Here, we push two numbers onto the stack and then call the + function, which pops both numbers off the stack and pushes the result of adding them back onto the stack: the output of the code is 5. Heres a slightly more interesting example:

Lets walk through this line by line:

1. First, we declare a function foo. Note that functions in cat specify no input parameters: all parameters are implicitly read from the stack. 
2. foo calls the < function, which pops the first item on the stack, compares it to 10, and pushes either True or False back onto the stack. 
3. Next, we push the values 0 and 42 onto the stack: we wrap them in brackets to ensure they get pushed onto the stack unevaluated. This is because they will be used as the "then" and "else" branches (respectively) for the call to the if function on the next line. 
4. The if function pops 3 items off the stack: the boolean condition, the "then" branch, and the "else" branch. Depending on the value of the boolean condition, itll push the result of either the "then" or "else" branch back onto the stack. 
5. Finally, we push 20 onto the stack and call the foo function.
6. When all is said and done, well end up with the number 42.

 For a much more detailed introduction, check out The Joy of Concatenative Languages.

This style of programming has some interesting properties: programs can be split and concatenated in countless ways to create new programs; remarkably minimal syntax (even more minimal than LISP) that leads to very concise programs; strong meta programming support. I found concatenative programming to be an eye opening thought experiment, but Im not sold on its practicality. It seems like you have to remember or imagine the current state of the stack instead of being able to read it from the variable names in the code, which can make it hard to reason about the code.

Declarative programming

GNU Prolog

Example languages: Prolog, SQL

Declarative programming has been around for many years, but most programmers are still unaware of it as a concept. Heres the gist: in most mainstream languages, you describe how to solve a particular problem; in declarative languages, you merely describe the result you want, and the language itself figures out how to get there.

For example, if youre writing a sorting algorithm from scratch in C, you might write the instructions for merge sort, which describes, step by step, how to recursively split the data set in half and merge it back together in sorted order: heres an example. If you were sorting numbers in a declarative language like Prolog, youd instead describe the output you want: "I want the same list of values, but each item at index i should be less than or equal to the item at index i + 1". Compare the previous C solution to this Prolog code:

If youve used SQL, youve done a form of declarative programming and may not have realized it: when you issue a query like select X from Y where Z, you are describing the data set youd like to get back; its the database engine that actually figures out how to execute the query. You can use the explain command in most databases to see the execution plan and figure out what happened under the hood.

The beauty of declarative languages is that they allow you to work at a much higher level of abstraction: your job is just to describe the specification for the output you want. For example, the code for a simple sudoku solver in prolog just lists out what each row, column, and diagonal of a solved sudoku puzzle should look like:

Here is how you would run the sudoku solver above:

The downside, unfortunately, is that declarative programming languages can easily hit performance bottlenecks. The naive sorting algorithm above is likely O(n!); the sudoku solver above does a brute force search; and most developers have had to provide database hints and extra indices to avoid expensive and inefficient plans when executing SQL queries.

Symbolic programming


Example languages: Aurora

The Aurora language is an example of symbolic programming: the "code" you write in these languages can include not only plain text, but also images, math equations, graphs, charts, and more. This allows you to manipulate and describe a large variety of data in the format native to that data, instead of describing it all in text. Aurora is also completely interactive, showing you the results from each line of code instantly, like a REPL on steroids.


The Aurora language was created by Chris Granger, who also built the Light Table IDE. Chris outlines the motivation for Aurora in his post Toward a better programming: some of the goals are to make programming more observable, direct, and reduce incidental complexity. For more info, be sure to see Bret Victors incredible talks: Inventing on Principle, Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, and Learnable Programming.

Update: "symbolic programming" is probably not the right term to use for Aurora. See the Symbolic programming wiki for more info.

Knowledge-based programming


Examples: Wolfram Language

Much like the Aurora language mentioned above, The Wolfram Language is also based on symbolic programming. However, the symbolic layer is merely a way to provide a consistent interface to the core of the Wolfram Language, which is knowledge-based programming: built into the language is a vast array of libraries, algorithms, and data. This makes it easy to do everything from graphing your Facebook connections, to manipulating images, to looking up the weather, processing natural language queries, plotting directions on a map, solving mathematical equations, and much more.


I suspect the Wolfram Languages has the largest "standard library" and data set of any language in existence. Im also excited by the idea that Internet connectivity is an inherent part of writing the code: its almost like an IDE where the auto-complete function does a google search. Itll be very interesting to see if the symbolic programming model is as flexible as Wolfram claims and can truly take advantage of all of this data.

In this series of Macromedia Flash 8 video tutorial clips, well show you how to create a Flash 8 Masking effect. A Flash 8 mask layer can be used to hide some portions of a layer underneath it, revealing only select areas. Its pretty simple and easy to learn, but there are a number of different, creative ways to make use of a mask in flash.

Part 1: Working with Flash 8 Masking - What is a Layer Mask?

In part 1, well show you a simple example that demonstrates the Flash 8 masking effect.
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Part 2: Working with Flash 8 Masking - Creating the Layer that will be Masked

NOTE: If youre working in Flash CS5 and youre having trouble finding the Static Text type option, make sure that in the Properties Inspector (while you have the Text Tool selected), you have Classic Text instead of TLF Text selected.

In part 2 of Working with Flash 8 Masking, well be creating the layer that will be masked. This layer will consist of some text.
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Part 3: Working with Flash 8 Masking - Creating the Animation in the Mask Layer

NOTE: If youre following along with this video, but youre working in Flash CS5, choose Create Classic Tween instead of Create Motion Tween.

In part 3 of Working with Flash 8 Masking, we will be creating the motion tween animation in the layer that we will use as the mask. The motion tween animation will consist of a circle that moves from the left to the right side of the stage.
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Part 4: Working with Flash 8 Masking - Converting a Layer into a Mask

In part 4 of Working with Flash 8 Masking, well show you how to convert a regular layer into a layer mask.
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Part 5: Working with Flash 8 Masking - Editing a Layer Mask

In part 5 of Working with Flash 8 Masking, well show you how to edit an already existing layer mask.
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