Strype, a Python frame-based editor

I&#x27;ve never really understood the desire to have high level programming environments for the micro:bit - blocks and such. I&#x27;ve nothing against those sorts of environments themselves. My son has hugely enjoyed Scratch and I think it has been educational for him. I just think it&#x27;s missing out on what makes micro:bit awesome.<p>With a high level programming environment a Micro:bit is just a very limited, cheap bit of hardware you can do a few fun things with. There&#x27;s novelty to it but it can do much less than the desktop computer you use to program it.<p>But the Micro:bit is an absolutely genius bit of kit for exploring <i>low level</i> programming!<p>AIUI, the Micro:bit has 2 microcontrollers on it, not one. The one you program is actually the less powerful of the two. The second microcontroller, which you can&#x27;t program, is there to control the USB port, implement mass storage and feed anything you put there to the programmable microcontroller.<p>This means you have an extremely simple RISC chip, with extremely simple hardware (leds, beepers and stuff) attached that you can control, and you can program it in assembler or C just by copying files to USB mass storage.<p>I haven&#x27;t started with this yet, but when he&#x27;s ready I plan to explore this in detail with my son. It seems like a perfect opportunity to explore how computers actually work and how software and hardware interact, without the huge complexity of more powerful hardware.<p>I mean, this should be educational for <i>me</i>!<p>This book looks like a potential starting point (not published yet, though): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk&#x2F;baremetal&#x2F;Bare_Metal_micro:bit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk&#x2F;baremetal&#x2F;Bare_Metal_micro:bit</a>

This looks really great, people have been exploring AST editors but I feel like this &quot;frame&quot; concept strikes a balanced between the structure an AST editor provides, and the need for free form text editing our normal text editors provide--I&#x27;m really interested to see how this feels in practic.

Very interesting, will try with the kids.<p>Bad naming though.

I didn&#x27;t realize the &quot;Scratch&quot; interface was called &quot;frame based editing&quot; [1]. Interesting.<p>My experience with novice programmers is that they have the most problems with code syntax and formatting. The fact that one misplaced comma or semicolon can prevent the whole program from running is incredibly frustrating and for many, is a significant obstacle that prevents further progress. I&#x27;ve seen with my own eyes, 10 year olds break down crying in frustration over a missing semicolon.<p>But I think it&#x27;s too early to &quot;standardize&quot; on this particular solution to the problem just yet. I feel we need a few more iterations before it is fully baked.<p>Millions of people around the world code every day at all levels of ability. When a better development system is devised, it&#x27;ll just naturally take over and we&#x27;ll see it everywhere. This isn&#x27;t it yet.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frame-based_editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Frame-based_editor</a>

Normally would never say anything about a name… but really? Strype? You are aware there is a massive payment processor&#x2F;trademark called Stripe right?

This would be cool to have a version that creates bash scripts. Most scripts are simple logical things like:<p>- run this tool, send its output to that tool<p>- if that fails then stop and show an error<p>- etc.

Is this open-source? Couldn&#x27;t find anything about that anywhere.<p>Would be awesome to integrate this with some other libraries made for beginners.

Interesting. Haven&#x27;t tried it myself but looks neat.<p>And here my 2 cents: I would be seriously surprised if Strype didn&#x27;t have any intention of integrating some visual based machine learning algorithm to help automate coding. Actually I&#x27;m quite surprised I haven&#x27;t seen any project doing that. Github copilot comes close but is text-based only. So no end-to-end software design. For that you need GUIs and thus more visual-based networks. Strype could be helping with that.

Interesting. Is there an open source and embeddable equivalent to this?