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The Little Coder's Predicament
An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article
on Advogato about the world of computing that kids today find themselves in compared to the world that kids in the 80's found themselves in. Learning to program in the 80's was simpler because the machines were more limited, and generally came with BASIC. Now we have Windows, which typically comes with no built-in programming language. What can be done to improve the situation?"
Let's face it, if you want to develop software, Unix or Linux is a great way to go. The price is right, the technology is current, the compilers are included, and multiple programming languages from lowest to highest level are included/available.
So if you want your child to have the experience of becoming a techie, it behooves you to have at least one workstation around that can at LEAST dual-boot into a *ix environment, IMHO.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
When I started programming, I was 8 years old, and worked with what I had available. I made simple GW-BASIC programs and have moved on from there. Maybe OS's should think about the next generation of devlopers and include some sort of learning language to get the kids hooked when they are young. At least they could learn the concepts, and grow up moving on to bigger and better languages as I did...
Something clever...
Hand them a Knoppix CD and a book on Python.
Or let them get python for Windows, if you must.
There is a neat game that uses java to make robots. Starting very simple, as you learn to program you make more powerful robots to compete against others.
IBM Robocode Home
Covered on slashdot here:
Robocode Rumble: Tips From the Champs
And here:
Learning Java Through Violence
Wax on, wax off baby!
My son has taught himself to program, with only a little guidance from me for learning how to analyze and break a problem into parts, by writing his own text adventure games using a programming language called Inform . This has worked very well - it allows him to express his creativity in the development of a scenario that requires following explicit rules to succeed, and to develop his programming skills in learning to express an algorithm that follows those rules he's created. The Inform community tends to freely share the text adventures they've written - you know a developing programmer is motivated when he spends time pouring over someone else's not-always-well documented source code.
Although it's not a programming language, I've found that most of the kids getting into programming these days started by making web pages in HTML. As they wanted to do more on the web, they opened up to scripting languages, like JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, etc. That eventually led them to CGI scripting or writing Java Applets and it has progressed from there.
Most hardcore types probably cringe at the thought, but web development is really the catalyst into getting many kids interested in programming.
As easy to learn, but not that strong on the "bad habbits forming" part is Visual Basic. It follows a completely different programming model to "normal" newbie languages but it is much more "goal-oriented" than most beginner languages. It is also easier to produce impressive results with it, and, frankly, the VB (and Visual Studio) IDE is as good as they get.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
At age nine is started messing around with QBASIC. Windows 3.1 had just come out and wasn't yet ubiquitous. I became quite proficient with BASIC, eventually, but by the time I had, the GUI extravaganza had begun. I was downloading and playing games for which I hadn't the slightest clue how a programmer might begin to implement such things. At some point, faced with the prospect of not being able to accomplish anything 'useful' with QBASIC, I stopped programming altogether.
I'm twenty one now and the itch to get back in to programming has been bugging me quite a bit. Now that I'm using Linux for pretty much everything -- and because Linux encourages tinkering -- I've found that scripting (Perl, Python, Ruby) languages (not THAT unlike BASIC) are the perfect place to start to refamiliarize myself with data structures and general programming concepts. The clentcher is of course that the CLI is once again useful and the programs I write can actually do something.
Namely, I've found Ruby to a great place to get started since I'm just beginning. Because Ruby is completely object orriented, it hasn't required a whole lot of reforming of the way I think about data -- everything is either a noun or a verb; an object or method. Just like the real world. After just two weeks of studying the freely available Ruby books online, I've been able to begin accomplishing basic system administration tasks. My passion for manipulating logic system is returning and I have some great ideas about what I can accomplish with it.
Sure, some day I'll probably have to pick up Java or (shudder) C++, but for now, scripting languages are the perfect entry method.
The people saying "just use Linux/FreeBSD/OtherOSS" are missing the point..
The problem isn't that Windows doesn't come with a programming language, but that there is no "learning system" in place..
I grew up in the 80's, and I learned to program first with my Vic-20, then with the C64..
I learned by typing in programs found in Compute! magazine and Compute!'s Gazette..
Such an environment simply doesn't exist today - even with Linux or FreeBSD (or how about Java if you don't want to learn a new OS?) the internet makes it harder to get into.. Instead of spending time typing the code in, you just download it.. sure, you can read it if you want, but reading about something is not the same as doing it - you don't get the same experience out of it.
Physically, programming is typing stuff, but with the internet, there's no incentive to actually do it - and like most other animals, people are (by nature) lazy.. so even if they have the drive to learn, they might not have the drive to actually do the work.
I tried using Robocode to teach my nephew how to code, but it's just not the same thing - he wanted to learn to program (still does, actually) but he gave up after just playing with it for awhile.. typing into a computer to get it to do something was just too foreign to him.
When he turned 13, I gave him an old 486, a manual on BASIC, and told him how to find it on the windows directory. Didn't do anything else other than type up a few lines of simple code. Natural curiosity took over. Soon he was writing complicated and lengthy RPGs, similar to what came out in the '80s. Next summer I gave him an old C++ book some visual basic stuff, and some disks. The next summer Java. And now he is going to be applying to a college that offers computer science in the fall. He codes in his sleep now. Oh, this summer's project is to take some boxes, some Linux disks, and make a web server, firewall, and Linux server.
My thought is that if the kid has the normal curiosity then just give them the tools and they will figure it out. There are plenty of old books and software available on Ebay and used book stores.
since there was little budget for big iron we did lots with Linux (web pages, mail server, ftp server, dhcp, even a commercial student database called Schoolmaster) and the Library teacher told me about a young kid (then in the 7th grade) whose family couldn't get him a computer of his own. I took a 486/120 and installed Linux with no gui on it and we allowed kids to check it out like a library book. I included just the basics to get on... how to login, how to use Lynx, where to find more information, the "man" pages, etc.
As far as I know this 7th grader was the only student who checked out the box. I got a few questions relayed to me by the library teacher and answered them. I lost track of him until my son told me that he turned up at a County Fair at the "internet cafe" my son was running and he was heavily into Llinux!
Last month my contact at the school district told me that the kid, now a junior in HS, is planning a senior project: a Beowolf cluster! He is now trying to round up a few dozen machines to use in his cluster.
This is a small school system in a farming community and turns out only one really good natural engineer/computer scientist every 4 or 5 years but I like to think that my idea of creating a "library book" computer using Linux helped turn out this one.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I think we ought to harness those resources. We ought to use them to teach children those languages that are immensely powerful yet, judged by our standards, too inefficient to be practical. In particular, I'm referring to functional programming languages like Scheme and Haskell.
Now, hear me out.
Why functional programming languages? Because they lend themselves to extremely powerful, mathematical ways of thinking about and solving problems. Learning these ways of thinking when young will benefit our children for the rest of their lives. For example, take a look at the The TeachScheme! Project. I wish something like that was available when I was in High School.
Let us not teach our children the technologies of today but of tomorrow. More and more, I am convinced that functional programming, once considered too computationally inefficient for industry work, will be tomorrow's dominant programming paradigm. No other way of programming so readily lends itself to the formalism that is necessary to manage the ever-increasing complexity of modern software projects.
So, let us give our children the tools they will need to solve the problems of their day. Teach them functional programming.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I've never heard about any standard Windows scripting *language,* but there is a standard Windows scripting system, called the Windows Scripting Host, WSH. It's not quite as nice the the Open Scripting Archetecture in Mac OS, but it isn't horrible.
WSH, like the OSA, is neat in that you can plug-in a number of different languages into it. In some ways, sort of a proto-.NET, as you can share functions between languages. That is, if I write up a function in Perl, I can share it throug the WSH to JScript, VBScript, or any other WSH language. Or vice-versa. PerlScript- the bridge between perl and the WSH- comes with the ActivePerl distro for Windows.
WSH is a neat toy, and I've used it for some automation on my work windows machine. But having done a lot of AppleScripting on my own and work Macs, I can say that WSH isn't as useful- most apps have no idea was WSH, and the apps which do support it, don't support the wealth of actions like Mac OS's OSA does. Mind you, AppleScript is just one language in the Mac OS OSA, and it happens to be the default one. However, you can get language extensions to script apps- just like you would in AppleScript- for Perl, JavaScript, Ruby and Tcl and more. (that was just off the top of my head)
Nobody is programming Doom III in anything except C, assembly, and maybe some C++. Does that make every other language irrelevant and worthless? No! I personally couldn't give a flying fuck about Doom III, and thankfully, never have to use C++. I must work on phantom appliacations! OOOOH SPOOKY!
I can't say I enjoy VB or use it anymore, but even being a staunch Smalltalk programmer, will not hesitate to use RealBasic (with which I can support Mac OS 9, X, and Windows) for an application for which it makes sense. There are a lot of applications out there which are written in VB, a lot more than you seem to think. Not just for very small, internal apps. Heck, a fair amount of people write a bunch of their code in C++, COMize it, then use it all from VB.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Anyhow, back to the present...
Some kid found my 3D asteriods game on the internet and asked me if I could teach him how to program. Note that he lives in another state, and I've never met him in person.
He was 12 at the time and struck me as being bright. I had him download the free Java stuff from Sun and we developed a video game applet together. We discussed what kind of game to make, how it would work, and the logic behind it. We decided on a simple game and then added features as we went along, rather than trying to implement his initial vision all at once. This let him see that progress was being made.
We didn't get into any OO stuff. In fact the structure of the game is more similar to C than to traditional Java code, but it was stuff he could understand. He wrote some of it and modified much of what I wrote.
You can check out the result here
Here is what I learned from the project:
Lasers Controlled Games!
In fact I would say that even downloading Tcl/Tk or Perl could be overengineering the solution.
The truth is that the Perl environment for Windows is not always intuitive and can occasionally prompt windows errors which are relatively easily understood by someone with a lot of computing experience but can be intimidating to a fledgling coder.
What people have overlooked is that windows does come with a built in interpreter for at least one widely used language: Internet Explorer knows all about Java.
The best part is that the Web is an environment most twelve year old kids are already quite familiar with. You can teach them basic HTML (if they haven't picked it up already) and then get them started on using Javascript. Javascript on a web page has the same sort of instant gratification that I remember from making the screen on my vic20 flash red and proclaim that I was cooler than my sister. Once they are comfortable with Javascript you can move them on to writing full-feldged Java applets (of course all of this coding can be done in notepad (or your favorite syntax-highlighting text editor)). In this way they will learn about object oriented programming. If the kid gets a good handle on writing Java applets and is still interested, they are probabl ready to move onto real programming: teach them C, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Maybe even give them a Linux box.
It's a simple way to learn programming on a modern windows box without having to install any developers kits or worry about system calls etc., and it all works in an environment (the Web) with which kids are already familiar and interested in.
lysergically yours
When I started, it was with the Sinclair ZX-81 I had as a Christmas present.
Today, I don't think it's necessarily the lack of built-in languages (as others have pointed out - most OSes come with a language of some sort) but a lack of where-to-get-started.
The great thing about the ZX-81 is that it came with a manual. Not like a PC manual of today which tells you how to plug in the keyboard and monitor (the ZX-81 manual had this) - the ZX-81 manual also had instructions on programming things - from the basics of programming onwards. It taught you what variables were, what loops were, what if statements did. You got a starting point with the computer as soon as you unpacked it and plugged it in for the first time.
The BBC Microcomputer was the best - it had a built in 6502 assembler. (I also learned Z80 for the Spectrum I had after the ZX-81). Knowing asm made it a lot easier to learn C, especially pointers (which I've noticed time and time again newbies always struggle with).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows