_nix wrote:

So when are my custom blocks going to be sorted alphabetically?

Actually what I want is for you to be able to drag your custom blocks around in the palette and have the position saved when you save the project or export the blocks. So you can add your block to a grouping, like say the list reporters, or the set color blocks, etc.

Are you guys (am I allowed to use “guys” meaning “friends of any *” these days?) banging on our new server? We need y'all (a great pronoun!) to find the bugs! Thanks…

Edit: You know, I can't think of a case in which replacing words they don't like with asterisks is a good solution. Either the word is being used in a benign context, as in this case, in which case the word should remain, or not, in which case the entire message is problematic and eliminating the keyword doesn't really help. Oh, I suppose if the word is a four-letter one, then just eliminating the word might be okay. But not for this word.

bharvey wrote:

am I allowed to use “guys” meaning “friends of any *” these days?

People do still use “guys” a lot, but really it's not any better than “ladies” or “men” or anything of the sort. Y'all is good, folks is good, everyone is good.

I actually haven't been using Snap! much lately! I've been super busy with school and a couple other projects. I'm really, really excited to eventually try the new Microblocks thing which Jens just made a video on. So I would just get a BBC microbit to use that? Is the version of Snap! with Microblocks-blocks online anywhere? (Also, oo, I totally read the description and want to try this with GP too )

EDIT: redacted, year(s) later

I haven't noticed anything different about the new server.

_nix wrote:

People do still use “guys” a lot, but really it's not any better than “ladies” or “men” or anything of the sort.

Meh, “guys” is pretty much gender neutral in most contexts unless you're using it in contrast to “girls” or “gals” or something. Merriam-Webster even includes this secondary definition: “person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of *”.

I’ve almost universally heard “guys” to refer to a mixed gender group of people, even by my mom and sister, as well as other non-male people. And some of us hate the words “folks” and, shudders, “y’all”.

birdoftheday wrote:

And some of us hate the words “folks” and, shudders, “y’all”.

I used to be heavily against the use of “y'all”, but now I've turned that ship around. Y'all is an awesome word! Having a plural form of “you” allows for clearer communication without any concrete cons arising as a result. I think I really changed my mind after learning Spanish (at a rudimentary level) and seeing first-hand how useful “usetedes” can be (although those uses are few and far between).

Interestingly, I've also taken a liking to contractions – particularly those with more than one shorted word. Phrases like y'all'd've are fantastic. Although perhaps my favorite is y'all'll'nt've'd's (you all will not have had us).

Wow, lots to answer.

Apostrophes: I do not believe that abbreviating “have had” as "[ha]ve'd“ is grammatical (in the newfangled sense, i.e., I don't believe that any native English speaker anywhere would say it).

Gender vs. that other word, with respect to ”guys“: I stand by my usage. Given that trans people, if I'm understanding correctly, want to be called ”male“ or ”female“ according to their felt category, not, ”masculine“ for ftm and ”feminine" for mtf, the narrower, more traditional definition of guys is about maleness, not masculinity. Am I confused? (It wouldn't surprise me – I've been confused before.)

School vs. Snap!: You don't have your priorities straight. 

Microbit: I've had one sitting in a drawer since forever but have just now gotten around to breaking the seal on the box. It looks cute. I've never been as excited about hardware as Jens is, though. But, whatever floats your boat.

Anyway, I do hope you-all find some time to bang on the server. You know, write a JSFunction that saves the project every 10 seconds, or something. Or save a project with all the Harry Potter movies. (Some kid did that on the old server and got upset because the project wasn't saved, sigh. I do think hx should have gotten a useful error message, though.)

“guys” is about maleness; (i.e. a gender-non-conforming man is still a “guy”, even though he may have a less masculine personality whatever that means. However, the word itself (“guys”) might be masculine, feminine, or neuter– or maybe it doesn't have a category because English doesn't really have grammatical gender; but it's meaning isn't referring to those categories.

EDIT: I forgot to close a bracket
EDIT: EDIT the wording of the EDIT summary

It’s like “nosotros” in Spanish IMO. People may complain that it uses a male ending (“-os”) to convey a gender neutral semantic meaning, but is there really a problem? Does a crack form in the heart of feminism every time someone says “nosotros”, or for that matter, “guys”? I would say, no, and there’s no reason to artificially change what has been in place for a long time and is not really hurting anyone. Feel free to share your opinion

Ah, I meant that I stand by my choice of that three-letter word over “gender” in discussing the “guys” issue, not that I stand by my use of “guys” in the first place, about which I'm questioning. (Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote possibly the best book about CS for lay people (as opposed to the best book about CS for CS learners, about which there is of course no question), is adamant that “guys” for a mixed group is sexist. I was surprised to attend a talk of his some years back and hear him talk about this rather than about CS.)

I think that people vastly overuse “gender” these days to avoid burning their tender ears, or the tender ears of children, with that other word, which should be absolutely unexceptional as the name of a category (as opposed to its use as the name of an activity) (although in a perfect world that would be unexceptional too). I've even seen it on new-patient questionnaires at doctors' offices, where what the doctor really wants to know is whether you should be worrying about prostate cancer or breast cancer, and whether it's okay to prescribe thalidomide. I believe the census forms haven't yet succumbed to this bowdlerization, but it's probably coming.

</rant>

P.S.: “nosotros”? We others? In French there's “vous autres,” literally “you others,” which means sort of the same as the British “you lot,” i.e., with a connotation that we're better than you are. But how does that make sense in the first person?

Edit: When I was a kid, the smart kids took French and the dumb kids took Spanish, don't ask me why, and of course I don't any longer believe in those categories anyway. I love being able to find my way around Paris, but in my actual work as a teacher in the US, it would be much, much better if I spoke Spanish.

P.P.S. The reason I don't just switch to “folks” or something is that, to my ear at least, it lacks the connotation that we're all friends (French “les mecs”). I don't say “you guys” to a bunch of strangers, and certainly not to enemies or rivals. In those cases “folks” would work fine.

I’m no Spanish etymologist, I wouldn’t be able to explain that, but “nosotros” means “we including myself”.
Edit: the reason I picked this specifically was because there is another word, “nosotras”, which is the same except the group is specifically women.

bharvey wrote:

When I was a kid, the smart kids took French and the dumb kids took Spanish, don't ask me why, and of course I don't any longer believe in those categories anyway. I love being able to find my way around Paris, but in my actual work as a teacher in the US, it would be much, much better if I spoke Spanish.

I think it tends to be because Spanish is more of the “default” option. At least for me, Spanish was required in elementary and middle school (junior high). If you're someone who doesn't care a lot about your foreign language, Spanish becomes the go-to.

I stuck with Spanish because I didn't want to start over after reaching High School. Memorizing vocab is hard and I'd rather not lose everything I've already got.

birdoftheday wrote:

“nosotros” means “we including myself”

Doesn't “we” always include myself? When would “nos” be appropriate but not “nosotros”?

PullJosh wrote:

At least for me, Spanish was required in elementary and middle school (junior high). If you're someone who doesn't care a lot about your foreign language, Spanish becomes the go-to.

Ah. I didn't learn any foreign language until 7th grade, when I had to choose ab initio (Also, the smart kids took Latin and the dumb kids took history.) between French and Spanish, and was strongly advised into French. They claimed that French is harder to learn, but in retrospect I suspect that in New York, there are all these largely-poor Puerto Rican immigrants (technically not immigrants because PR is part of the US, but you know what I mean) who speak Spanish, so our counselors probably had an unconscious bias that Spanish is for poor people.

(And this was a fairly exclusive private school, so our “dumb” kids were all college-bound, making the whole thing even stupider.)

Edit: I should clarify that of course none of the adults, and not many of the kids, used the words “smart” and “dumb.” It's actually quite a progressive school, as schools go, and I bet this language division is no longer the policy.

P.S. Your sig picture is creepy.

bharvey wrote:

P.S. Your sig picture is creepy.

It's not even my fault.

I've just learned about assertions and am curious whether such a feature has ever been considered for Snap.

PullJosh wrote:

I've just learned about assertions and am curious whether such a feature has ever been considered for Snap.

Wait, do you mean assertions as in ASSERT [if this isn't true, throw an error], or as in assertions and rules, i.e., logic programming?

If the former, no, you can do that yourself trivially as a JSFunction.

If the latter, yes, we are enthusiastic about the idea, but (1) there are a bunch of other big things before it on the list, e.g., macros, and (2) as of now, we don't have a clue how to fit them in with the block visual metaphor.

bharvey wrote:

Doesn't “we” always include myself?

Ha ha, you got me

When would “nos” be appropriate but not “nosotros”?

Nosotros = subject
Nos = object
Same difference between yo and me