Recently discovered MiniScript / Mini Micro

sebnozzi

Dear Joe and Mini Micro community,

my name is Sebastian Nozzi. I'm a professional software developer. My driving areas of interest are "clean code" (code design / maintainability) and programming languages / environments - in particular for learning / teaching. I do think that programming should be at the reach of anyone; something I see less and less becoming the case nowadays.

I recently discovered first MiniScript and shortly after that Mini Micro and wanted to express my appreciation towards the work of beauty you have done. I think these quotes express the essence of both MiniScript as a language and Mini Micro as a platform:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
(attributed to Albert Einstein, apparently wrongly so)

I think both MiniScript and Mini Micro succeed in the following:

providing a language / environment sufficiently "friendly" for beginners to learn programming
being sufficiently extensible / powerful for programmers to grow with it and
for advanced programmers not to feel constrained.

I found Mini Script after a long search both for a Scratch successor (something to recommend young programmers / beginners after outgrowing Scratch) and for a distraction-free / simple platform for personal just-for-fun projects for myself.

Curiously, I stumbled upon it by scanning code examples at RosettaCode - in the search for something with the same visual (syntactic) appeal of BASIC but more modern and powerful. As someone who holds Smalltalk very dear to my heart, but does not use it much for practical reasons (often reverting to Python), I really appreciate the simplicity and power of the language.

And as someone growing up in the 80's and 90's, and having made my first experiences with computer programming back then I surely appreciate what Mini Micro as an environment has to offer.

In particular, I like these aspects - which I think make Mini Micro unique:

It brings back the "distraction free" aspect of computers from the past. Only one program running. Only one editor. A prompt waiting for commands. No bells and whistles. Simplicity, minimalism and focus.
It makes it very easy to experiment and try things out. I pretty much like that the variables of the program are accessible when it ends and they can be interacted with. It is of course great that the "prompt" is MiniScript itself.
It allows the user to customize and extend the environment (re-defining things, tinkering with settings and start-up scripts).
It does not constraint the programmer to one kind of game or application, or in the complexity of a program. It allows the use of modules and because it has no built-in tools it does not suggest certain kinds of programs (like Scratch, Pico8 or TIC-80 - as much as I also appreciate them)
and I think I could go on but don't want to bore you ... In short: Mini Micro makes (discovery) programming fun again. At least for me.

In short, I think both technologies are a great achievement in their aspirations, design and execution. I think they strike great balances in key areas. And I'm definitely having much fun trying them out!

I hope that some day Mini Micro / MiniScript gain the attention and traction that they deserve.

Thanks for the great work, and see you around ;-)

Cheers,
Sebastian

jstrout

Wow, thank you so much for your kind words! What you describe is exactly what I was trying to achieve.

I can tell already you're going to be a valuable member of the community. I'm so glad you found us!

neku

dear sebastian, joe & all others here

where or how i discovered miniscript, i can't say anymore. but it's very likely that it was also in rosetta. i also like (at least syntactically) the kind of "modern" basic as seen for example in euphoria/phix. i like it when the graphical primitives are included in the language itself.

it seems to me that it makes no sense to add a library (like qt) to a simple (or seemingly simple) slim language. it seems out of place to me if the graphic code is x-times longer than the actual program itself.

my professional activity (in the last active years) was db-based applications (order processing/invoicing). now i want to see something different. i want to write (on win-pc) small programs ala "peg14" or "knight's tour" and view/play them on my android tablet or phone.

i gave unnerved (actually frustrated) up trying with android sdk and all the necessary tools. a simpler solution (for me) is offered by the game engines (corona, gideros.. love2d - as long as the delay property doesn't matter).

the enthusiasm for fantasy computers has not taken hold of me yet. so some may ask what i'm actually looking for here...

i like miniscript very much. the few lines i have written with it so far went quite well. often it was easier than i thought at the beginning.

another pleasant experience is the way joe takes the comments. whether he likes them or not is really beside the point. but he doesn't shoot them down right away.

greetings to all
nestor

ps
joe... i eagerly await your report concerning soda/windows on monday.