Programming advice

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I’m a longtime Hype user, but I know (from the sample work that people share in the forums) that I am barely scratching the surface. I’d like to get better, and I think the next step for me is to learn some programming/coding. So my questions:

  1. Any advice on where I can learn some programming or coding (javascript, etc) that would help me do more with Hype?
  2. Am I even asking the right question? Is there some other step that I should take
2

Did you watch these videos?

…or these videos…

“A Book About Hype” has a good JavaScript crash course, but I'm waiting for Hype 5 to launch a new edition. It's not available right now. Yet, a lot of the templates are available…

— https://photics.com/tag/template/

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Like all things, it depends what you're trying to do and what limits you are hitting against. While Hype is meant to be able to do a lot of types of animations and interactive content without code, there's a few specific areas that are not in the Hype UI that we make an explicit decision to delegate to Javascript:

  • Logic: if there's certain conditions, then do some specific actions
  • Loops: do something some number of times or based on a a logical condition
  • Data: persist data, query data, or use external data sources

These types of programming tasks are hard to express in UI, and the difficulty comes more from the reasoning than the specific code syntax. While some intrepid users have made plugins/extensions to Hype that handle cases that might be common in certain scenarios, ultimately there's no limits to what you can do when coding.

On a more personal/subjective note, I do think programming is a valuable life skill an lets you look in the world in a different light - one of automation and extending human ability via the pure speed of computers. With AI coding more people than ever have these capabilities unlocked... though having a solid foundation will still allow you to better guide AI and also check that its work reflects your intent.

I don't have specific recommendations on how to learn since I learned so long ago. I'd probably recommend looking at a course and make sure it has a lot of projects to try to do, and that those projects actually interest you. When I learned, a lot of early projects were more math and stat based (like calculating odds of winning at craps) and this didn't quite capture me. But when I moved on to more graphical/visual programming projects I was hooked. Definitely things in the JavaScript realm that are more devoted to modifying HTML/CSS will be applicable to Hype.

And of course in the post above @Photics has excellent resources for programming as it directly relates to Hype. He's an absurdly excellent explainer :slight_smile:.

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Thanks Jonathan and Photics!

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