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'CodeSpells' Video Game Teaches Children Java Programming
CyberSlugGump writes "Computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed a 3D first-person video game designed to teach young students Java programming. In CodeSpells, a wizard must help a land of gnomes by writing spells in Java. Simple quests teach main Java components such as conditional and loop statements. Research presented March 8 at the 2013 SIGCSE Technical Symposium indicate that a test group of 40 girls aged 10-12 mastered many programming concepts in just one hour of playing."
Or like a windows 3.11 ui for an edutainment product that came with the computer...
whatever, as long as it works
38 of the 40 girls in the test group complained that, once they were written in Java, the spells took forever to execute.
Java isn't what it used to be.
Over half of the population is way too dumb to understand programming in the first place. It's better to start off with a good language.
Also, C is easier than Java. C++ maybe not, but then it sucks balls too.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Java is a great language for beginners. It teaches you all the basics of OOP without all the confusing mess that can accompany garbage collecting and pointers.
Let's compare the two, shall we?
CodeSpells actually exists and is backed by a university. Code Hero shows no signs of ever being completed and is backed by a guy who's notorious for scamming people.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Pointers are not complicated, I'm sorry. Mabye for 8 year olds, but that's why they should learn Python. It's actually really easy, it's a very popular language, and it teaches good coding practices as well as jack-off object oriented concepts.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I had a similar idea some time ago, but with an MMORPG setting.
One of the issues that has always rankled me hard was the "cookie cutter" nature of the world events in those games, as well as the limiting gameplay options, so I had this idea for "obfuscated and sigilized" programming syntax as the basis for a game's magic system. Rather than presenting a loop as a nested block of instructions, it would depict it as a "container", with subcomponents inside. Kind of a mix of flowcharting and stylized syntax.
The idea was that the layout of the "enchantment" could be moved and teased to make clever images out of the interconnected containers and symbolic representations, to make the programmatical nature of the system less banal, and much more aesthetically attractive, while simultanously making the kinds of magic and counter magic highly diverse and dynamic.
I never really did much with the idea (ideas aren't worth much, despite what the USPTO and several shell corps may claim. Implementations are far more valuable.), and all the "on paper" mental models I tried kept having non-trivial problems.
I like seeing that somebody had a similar idea, and made a working implementation.
System.out.println("You win!");
no one uses python in the real world outside of linux nerds, and your not going to teach kids that confusing bullshit whitespace formats, fuck programmers hate it too
Yeah, like all those Linux nerds at Google. And the significant whitespace isn't confusing, at least not to anyone who has learned how to write an outline.
(I've been programming for more than thirty years, and I love Python.)
Obligatory xkcd: Python!
Pointers really are complicated for anyone IQ 110 or below. Most people who attempt CS weed out classes are above average, but half struggle with pointers.
FYI, the target audience IS elementary school students.
right. you know everything. PLaying with something and engaging in it and relating it to fun and excitement like Harry Potter and "expelliarmus" (and knowing some of the roots of words and such) can teach you more than purely "rote memorization" could.
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Rote memorization could maybe get them to pass a multiple choice exam where they can pick out which is "a conditional statement" out of the choices, or perhaps which is a valid beginning or end of a loop construct, but play-acting and engaging the mind into thinking and wanting to find a solution is more likely to instill concepts into the children's minds and brains. Concepts can cross domain boundaries, and learning a concept in topic A could allow you to use that concept in other seemingly unrelated topics.
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Don't throw your derision at this. Different people learn in different ways.
Nah, it's more readable to use whitespace to denote codeblocks. It's not like it's easy to match up a bunch of curly braces. And you should be indenting anyway, right?
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Colobot was here before this, and I'm sure there are many other games that involve programming as major gameplay. Colobot itself didn't use an existing language (had some kind of OOP thing made up by the devs), but the idea is there. But still, I'm glad the idea is being pushed. I really enjoy games that pushes the skill on the players, with actual skill, not merely time invested or money invested.
the game
Don't forget the Southerners. They need to be able to learn it too ya'll.
Sorry that should've been http://iolanguage.org/
But... the future refused to change.
I live in the South and teach Sunday School. So I guess I fall under some double-negative clause.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That's elitist bullshit. 90% of the population of the world could easily learn to program and learn to do it proficiently. If we taught binary and boolean logic earlier in life, programing would be second nature. And yes I interview crapy engineers regularly. It's not lack of capability holding them back, but rather piss poor education.
That's why Java has builtin garbage collection, DUH!
White space works to denote code blocks only if everyone agrees on what readable code looks like. But since K&R taught everyone the wrong way, you might find it hard to get people to agree. With white space being insignifacant each reader of the code can format it however they want. One might argue that we should not even be storing formatted code but leave the format up to the ide/editor.
Agree. Teaching Java to kids is child abuse.
My nearly six-year-old is doing great things (for a kindergartner) with KTurtle -- which is really a pretty cool environment (I was surprised to find). He also spends much time hacking crazy stuff with redstone in Minecraft. The next logical step to real programming language seems to me, keeping it fun and relevant to his interests, is to introduce some javascript (as much as I dislike it) so he can mess up web pages with little effort. From there it seems python is the friendliest, easiest and most resource-rich multi-purpose playground.
Maybe CodeSpell will be something to check out eventually. Though the java example on their blog doesn't look all that fun to me. I hope its fun. If it gets to the point where I'm teaching the kid OOP, and all the verbose java syntax requirements, he'll probably only want to make minecraft mods. That's what CodeSpell is up against in this house.
Yeah, you go ahead and explain loops and conditional statements to 40 10-year-olds. They'll learn it in 5, master it in 10, forget all about it in 15. They'll probably be bored, too.
Or you can use a software like this which will engage them, encourage them, and help them remember it when they go home that night. It sure would be a shame if they were excited to learn more the next day and had a platform that was there to teach them and give you time to grade their math tests.
Yeah, you interview crappy >. Try talking to liberal arts students or people who have not gone to college.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Bollocks.
is engineers. Slashdot cut it off as a tag
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
It takes a whole hour to teach 10 year olds loop and conditional statements, something that could be taught in 5 mins and mastered in 10? Why yes, sign my school district up for this, how many millions will it cost?
Your statement is complete nonsense. I teach high school computer science, and even the most talented kids take hours of practice to master loops.
Gee, when you talk to people that never learned programming they know nothing about programming. If you are having trouble explaining it then the problem might not be on their side.
... but it seems they are willfully ignoring Linux as a platform. And teaching about computers. Yeah, cliche to complain about it, I know, but it does seem kind of disingenuous at best.
Perhaps to someone who has been trained in C but not Java. The biggest problems with C when compared against Java is the limited extent of its standard library, sorting through the plethora of poorly documented non-standard libraries that are available (vs Java, where if there isn't a standard for it, then the next obvious stop is apache.org) and the fact that you need to understand the hardware architecture of the system you are developing for in a lot of cases, as well as distinctions between stack and heap and a bunch of low level gotchas in the language that are far from obvious to the newbie, or even to experienced developers sometimes.
Also, you said "your" instead of "you're"; if you are confused by this, these words are used correctly here: "you're a moron, your opinion doesn't count."
In the Diamond Age, the "premier" teaches logic, programming and nanotechnology in a similar fashion.
While it is good to see the concept taken to practice.....
Nothing new to see here, move along. ;-)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Read it ages ago and enjoyed it a lot.
Perl Programmer for hire
I would argue that it's probably more beneficial to teach children some completely fictional programming language. Let the intelligent ones figure out theoretical improvements.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I was just visting with the good folks at the local Python users group. Nice folks, but the when I dug into where the actual jobs are it was clear Python was not a bread winner by a long shot. Most of them were using only Python when they were bidding out the work and the client had no input into the language to use. That tended to be side gigs. The 9-to-5 work was usually Java or .Net.
Python certainly has it's great points, but so do a dozen of so does Groovy, Clojure, Ruby and Scala. I know a lot of folks using Python to help manage their cloud deploys. But the actual applications tend to be written in Java or a language that's going to compile to Java Optcode. Like Jython.
Seriously? Never heard of something called "Google"?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'll have to ask you to back that up. Python 1.0 is from 1994, and didn't have much by way of specialized facilities for this purpose. Sure you aren't thinking of PHP?
Anyhow, if you care about "type systems and formalism", you should be on Haskell; Java is distinctly half-assed. (Type-erasure generics? Really?!)
I wish I had mod points right now.
One of the best things I ever had as a kid was a TRS-80 (CoCo - and not a true TRS-80 either, even though that was stamped on it) that booted to a BASIC interpreter. The code for any games I loaded directly off disk could be tinkered with easily, no need to compile. This was awesome as a curious 5 year old.
Even better about it were the games "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey". These games taught me the basics of digital electronics, lessons which have actually helped in my current career as a technician (with no formal training in digital logic). Seeing this kind of software being produced in a modern setting is awesome, I wish there was more of it.
Java is an OK language, but it's kind of bureaucratic and boring. I can't think of a better way to suck all the magic out of a fantasy game than to have the spells written in Java---except maybe having the kids produce an ER diagram and a set of tables in Boyce-Codd normal form.
At the very least, they could do without the pointless punctuation. Does a spell really have to have semicolons and empty parentheses to denote that the spell is imperative?
As opposed to the high level gotchas in Java? ;)
Java can be just as obtuse as C, if not more so.
The reason that Java isn't as fun to program is the same reason that it's good for businesses. The language is very restrictive and prescriptive of how you should do things. For programmers that want flexibility and power, the constraints and extra typing (dual-meaning intended) chafe. But when you're using it as part of a large group, those same constraints become the things you can depend on. Where is a certain class located? Java requires it to be in a certain directory. What methods are available on a class? Java's static type system was designed to make tooling easy, so your IDE will tell you. And even talented programmers can mess up manual memory management...the less-talented wouldn't stand a chance without Java's memory management. The list of things that Java prevents you from screwing up is quite long.
Basically, for my home coding projects and projects where I work with a small team of talented developers, Java is one of my last choices. But for my boring 9-5 job where I'm working with 30 knuckle-draggers who don't understand the purpose of an interface, let alone how to write functional code that's easy to read, I want them writing Java and I'm willing to pay the Java price to get that.
That's not their fault; it's the fault of our educational system.
While the mods may not agree with you very strongly, I've seen a wealth of evidence that says Java is a bad introductory language. The CS department at my alma mater switched from an all-Java curriculum to one with a Python intro, and the student attrition rate dropped by a significant margin. A friend of mine—the daughter of two CS profs—was dead-set on avoiding programming as a teenager until I introduced her to languages other than Java.
While the formalisms and syntax are great for software engineers writing reusable and interoperable code, they're a serious blight to beginning programmers. The practice of teaching nothing but Java is probably more responsible for the post-dotcom drop in enrolment than the actual tech sector recession. Children should be taught something with a simple, easy-to-understand operating model like BASIC, Turing, or Pascal. It's frustrating to think about how much work went into programmer education in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and how it's all been thrown away just because the languages at hand were obsolete.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I just looked at the architecture of CodeSpells - the Unity3D game launches a JVM when a spell is executed. The JVM makes a TCP connection to the Unity3D engine, so that, when a Java spell is executed, the framework issues over the socket commands in UnityScript, a dialect of ECMAScript.
Oh, boy, just wait until we have to explain to the next generation of programmers the difference between Java and JavaScript.
Link to the framework: https://github.com/srfoster/June
Indeed. Seriously fuck java. I decided to try to learn Java after quite a few years of not coding (not that I ever got that advanced with it anyway). There are not enough derogatory words in all languages combined to describe my hatred of Java. It seems simple and straightforward at first, but this is deception! (To be fair, some of my issue is with the buzzword like jargon associated with it and OOP in general, fucking insanity). Sure, basic math to advanced math (which is generally what I use code for being a current Math major) isn't that bad, and not really any different from C or even BASIC. But anything you want to do beyond that is a fucking nightmare. Want to poll the mouse? keyboard? draw to the screen? Simple, straightforward tasks, here's the proper syntax, the relevant objects, blah blah blah. Oh wait, it doesn't work? Did you remember to do this? oh you did, oh in that case you weren't supposed to, still doesn't work? hrmmm.....
I'm sure there probably is an underlying logic to it, I'm sure a more experienced Java vet could easily tell me what was wrong with it, but you know, documentation and maybe a reference book or two should be all anyone needs to get through a new language. Maybe I'll just stick with pseudocode and be happy. I've actually been digging C# lately because it makes that stuff EASY. It's simple, it's straightforward, there aren't as many bizarre syntax quirks.
But yeah, easy to understand languages that capture the general concept of algorithm construction are best for intro programming, drop the syntax and buzzword nonsense and just focus on structure. Hell even just sticking with pseudocode for a beginner might not be bad (though, they wouldn't be able to run a program and see a result, so no feedback).
Almost everyone I've encountered was unable to understand mathematics. They memorized formulas and procedures before reaching university, sure, but guess what? They were weeded out very, very quickly by teachers who actually expect you to understand the material, and that even happened after the instructors tried to help them. Some people just don't and can't 'get it'.
I really think algorithm structure and design (from a math perspective) is more important for a beginning coder than things like OOP and memory management, yes those are important, especially with how prevalent OOP has become, however OOP is just a wrapper around the math and the memory management will flow from sound and logical structures. Pseudocode is probably the best first step, aside from it lacking the ability to be executed.
Irony of ironies, C# is almost exactly like Java at the language level, only with a totally different object hierarchy, which is why it's easier for UI development. The .NET hierarchy is somewhat influenced by classic VB, which was a very well-developed and efficient (if sometimes limiting) format for expressing common UI needs.
Java's popularity, sadly, has to do exactly with that OOP evangelism. In the late eighties and early nineties, academic software engineers were absolutely convinced OOP was the silver-bullet software development paradigm for all ills, since encapsulation (hiding methods) made code re-use practical. They also believed it was the end to all programming practices that inhibited re-use, particularly global variables. Unfortunately they made the mistake of conflating these practices with "laziness," and very mistakenly believed in a bizarrely Victorian fashion that all beginners should be forced to use only best practices, as though we should be teaching infants proper manners straight out of the crib.
It's stupid enough that I sometimes wonder if it was a massive conspiracy by Sun's marketing department, but to be honest computing has always been full of fads like this. In the early eighties, logic programming was The Way Of The Future; everyone thought that Prolog and constraint-satisfaction-based expert systems (basically, fancy predicate logic expression solvers) would dominate computing for the rest of time. Today, there are only a few niches where new Prolog code is considered desirable.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
No, but it might not hurt to try and find a way to introduce those concepts earlier? The same goes for programming, logic is a segment of mathematics that is essential to programming yet doesn't require concepts such as addition and its offshoots (almost every other operation commonly used in Math). Boolean and Binary logic are the foundation of programming and are simple enough that a 5 year old can grasp them. Sure, they may not be able to design complex circuits at that age (though you might get the occasional child who will wow you) but they could most certainly understand the concept and apply it at a basic level.
Oh trust me, I get that about C#, it's just that much of a step up above Java (and both have roots in C, so the transition was fairly easy). Granted I'm old enough to where when I started programming OOP hadn't even become a fad yet (to be fair, I started at a much earlier age than most of my peers - PC's weren't common in the home at the time - mid 80's). Though I still tend to think procedurally, I like the concepts of OOP, just hate that evangelism and the needless jargon introduced to separate it from everything that came before it. Methods? Really? Did we honestly need to introduce a new word for what is essentially a function? Encapsulation? Ok, now we are just moving into intellectual elitism.
I like your Victorian comparison. I find it rather fitting.
While I agree with your sentiment about "why use Java" for something like this, I also really applaud this kind of thing. Yeah, different language or language invented specifically for this app probably would have been better, but introducing kids to programming at an early age is win over all.
Just like in math, CS is riddled with context-specific names for refinements of the same thing. You wouldn't want to conflate a ring with a field, right? For what it's worth, though, the first OOP language, Simula, just called them "procedures" at the syntax level. And in the case of encapsulation, there really isn't a good, compact term for "writing all of your code properly so that nothing inappropriate is publicly accessible," so that was kind of a new concept that needed a new name.
But for what it's worth, I'm not a fan of OOP terminology either, and cringe whenever a Java-educated programmer uses the word "method" to describe any old subroutine. I assume there were structured programming advocates back in the early eighties who got annoyed when C programmers started calling everything "functions," even when they didn't have return values.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
In other words, "Java is for other people." I feel the same way: I used to hate Java, but now I respect it for the reasons you just described.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As a Math major I totally get that. Especially at the more advanced level where you start using perpendicular, orthogonal and normal pretty much interchangeably. In programming, I've used "procedure", "subroutine", "function" and "method" to describe what is conceptually the same thing. I like function best because of the easy tie in with Math, granted given the mathematic definition of a function, I can see where a function with no return value seems bizarre.
As far as encapsulation goes, while I get that there wasn't a term in programming prior to the concept being introduced, it just feels buzzwordy and elitist. Object at least makes sense, so does class. Constructor? Sure, I'll buy it. But encapsulation just feels intentionally obtuse, I'll totally blame that on your marketing conspiracy theory.
I've at times considered delving more into CS with the goal of developing my own high level language, but my interest in CS really is only an extension of my interest in Mathematics and Physics and the desire to use computational resources to support applications of both. I'm also afraid that while my goals in developing said language might be noble, that I would easily get distracted and end up developing something just as obtuse if not more so. I certainly have a lot of respect for the difficulty of the task.
At the elementary level I don't think the choice of language with reference to the business environment is that important. Teaching kids that they can make their computer/tablet/whatever DO STUFF and presenting it in an easy to digest format is much more valuable that what is big in the industry now. Keep in mind, elementary age... at least 20 years (on average) until they start rolling to the job market. Not all of them will be programmers. The languages we use now may be dying by that point. they may not all be programmers, some may be scientists using more focused languages in the vein of Matlab, some may be homemakers, some may be athletes, some may be artists. But they will all have an appreciation for technology and what it can do. They will all get introduced to logic and algorithmic structure at a much earlier age than is normal right now. Those things easily apply to other aspects of life. Hell, if they keep at programming strictly on a hobby basis, they may even catch on to when the developers at their company/organization/whatever are BS'ing them about what can and cannot be accomplished.
I need to lay off the alcohol tonight. I just realized I responded to two of your posts in the exact same fashion. /sigh
Actually I think the key is just "when it interests them".
I mean we can apply classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and other methods all day long. Providing the material in a way that engages, interests and challenges an individual is always best, but the method for doing that may vary from individual to individual.
From the dictionary: "to become thoroughly proficient"
I think I need an hour of CodeSpells and I can add Java proficiency to my CV; I've only spend a hundred hours coding in it, so I've set my skill as "exposed to" instead.
This is 2013, we shouldn't have to indent manually still. If you want to cut/paste a few lines of of code from one section to another, if the indentation doesn't match it can be seriously annoying in python to get it all correct. Compare this to java, where as long as it is between the curly brackets I know it will be OK. Press the shortcut for auto-indent, and I can tell immediately if it is in the right place.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
In my opinion the worst OOP offences are what sane people call "setters" and "getters", but are what are probably called "mutators" and "accessors". To most people they're a necessary evil when you want to limit the range of values a variable can take on (although C# does this transparently with properties, which Microsoft (confusingly) recommends starting with an upper-case letter... what the hell, Microsoft?) but in Java, students are often taught to write them even when they're completely transparent and deal with primitive types that can't even be null!
As for developing new languages, mathematicians have actually contributed a great deal to CS in that department. Matlab and R represent the best-known math-centric languages, and tellingly, Matlab is very anti-theory—it can't pass variables by reference, no matter how big your matrices are. With a bit of digging, you might find that the language you really want is already out there, and already heavily-optimized. (Which is by far the biggest challenge in implementing a useful math-intensive programming environment.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Bed, yes... bed is the thing we all need.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I think Java is fun to program in for exactly those reasons. For me the fun in programming is getting cool results and Java allows one to create complex stuff without having to constantly worry about shooting oneself in the foot. It allows me to use my full brain capacity for the actual algorithms I want to create and doesn't add lots of cognitive load. Especially when using a powerful IDE, like Netbeans.
Try tekkit for minecraft, it will give you a mod called computercraft which will allow you to place computers with consoles on the map and even hook up wireless modems and a disk drive to them. Using lua you can then program these computers to do whatever you want basically, me and my brother made 3 train stations which would handle carts and track switches with the computers. You can even program "bots" with lua and have them build structures and whatnot. They can even defend your area if you want. All this is done with lua inside the minecraft game. You can of course import larger scripts from outside the game since typing them in the console minecraft provides can take a while.
Anveto
I still have enough of the old procedural mindset in me to avoid setters, getters, mutators and accessors all at once! What is even better is that /.'s apparently recently implemented spelling/grammar check doesn't like mutator or accessor. +1 for the sane people I suppose? I don't write code to be rolled out into a large package to be reused by someone else elsewhere in an obtuse and poorly implemented fashion. I will set my variables to what I want, how I want, when I want.
Oddly enough my desire for developing a new language is not rooted in my scientific interests, but rather just an ease of use interest. Hell, ultimately my ideal language would be one you could just speak into a microphone as if it were your native verbal language and be understand and compile. (I realize there is quite a bit of complication with something like that, verbal language is so logically inconsistent). Essentially I want to be able to execute pseudocode. I want programming to be a natural extension of verbal language (or at least the language of Math). I don't want to have to worry about close parens, semi-colons, invoking some random ass class just because it's required to implement another random ass class I need, with it's own special syntax and parameters that are mandatory but unused.
Matlab I've just started digging into as it seems to be the best for what I'm trying to accomplish academically at the moment. Just wish I had more time. I envy those who can afford to attend school full-time ;)
Indeed, Thank you for the quality discussion! I will now go investigate the mystery that is sleep.
>I've been programming for more than thirty years, and I love Python
In my experience, the people who love Python are hack programmers who are sloppy with types and exceptions in the beginning, and python just enables the sloppiness.
I think its true that a lot of hack programmers like Python, but it is not true that everyone who loves Pythin is a hack programmer. I know you didn't actually say that but it came across that way.
With white space being insignifacant each reader of the code can format it however they want.
And that's a bad thing. I mean you don't have people choosing what they want to call the commands in a programming language. That would be chaos. Some people have tried... remember
#define BEGIN {
#define END }
With indenting as with commands, it's far better of the language defines a common standard, with deviations being a warning or an error. That way, when are working collaboratively their code is guaranteed to be in the same indentation style.
Unfortunately no language I know of does this. Python comes closest, but they stopped short of defining how big an indent is. So code from different sources can still be indented differently.
They could have the spells backfire if they put credentials or access tokens in plain text within the applications.
No pointers are complicated in any large size software project. Because they point to memory which you have to handle allocating and freeing yourself when not needed and not being referenced. When you have pointers to pointers to pointers then deciding what code has the responsibility of handling freeing what pointer memory which is not always handled by the same code it becomes easy to make a mistake. Garbage collected programming solves all these low level tedius memory handling automatically.
Hmm...
I've coded in Assembler, FORTRAN, and COBOL in the past. I've even been paid to teach people C. I wrote my first BASIC program in 1968.
Now I use Java on Linux, with Postgres as our database of choice.
Looks like I'll get funding to double the number of programmers in my team from one to two people - we will be using a prerelease of of Java Enterprise 7.
For large complex projects Java is fine, even for very small teams.
Java is better than C for most projects - don't need to worry about pointers and allocating memory.
Good programmers are fluent in at least 3 different computer languages, and try to use the one most appropriate.
Bad programmers insist that their favourite language is best.
One of the main problems with C# is that it runs best on an O/S that is all but dead in name.
Java is cross platform, you can develop in a Linux environment and run the program in other O/S's.
I had a ten year old phone me up because he wanted to learn Java, his choice.
He is willing and able to concentrate on programming for hours at a time.
I will encourage him to learn several other languages as well - that way he will better distinguish between programming concepts and their implementation in a particular language.
Fortran?
A one-two dose of video games and computer programming was deemed more effective than traditional abstinence-only education.
So we're agreed, using C as the first introduction to programming is a bad idea? Not that I'm advocating Java, or even Python as the best solution, both are only marginally better. Scratch is more like it - as simple to learn as Logo, but less boring (Logo held my interest for about half an hour when I was young, by that time I'd about reached the limitations in what could be done with a pen and 4 directional commands).
The only obtuseness I've encountered in Java is the hoops you have to jump through to interoperate with an API from another language that uses unsigned types.
C tutorials on the other hand are full of examples where *(x+1) is used interchangeably with x[1], which ends up becoming a habit for years until one day you hit one of the edge cases where those statements are not equivalent and are left scratching your head as to why your program is crashing. Endianness is never hidden behind an API, since the whole C philosophy is to be fast, not easy to use, so anyone doing networking code on an Intel architecture for the first time has a bunch of pitfalls waiting for them. Then there's all the cases where C happily lets you overwrite memory outside the bounds of an array etc, leaving you to debug the memory corruption that results, where Java would have thrown a clear exception telling you exactly what you did on which line of code.
How about Javascript and run in the browser or on the cloud instead? There's nothing commenting on why Java was chosen but it seems a very surprising decision to come out of a computer science department ... or maybe not. Are academics really keeping pace with technology or the public interaction with technology?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
True, but that's also why it's bad as a first language. It only teaches a very narrow view of programming, and does that in a painful way.
In C, you don't have to create a separate namespace with specifically named folders and files, and a separate class just to be able to say "hello world". Kids lose interest very quickly if they don't get results, having to learn about OOP before they write their first program isn't going to work.
I feel like my signature is very relevant today.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Code should be readable be the person reading it. If you find one form of indentation to be readable and your partner another, then you should each be able to format it however you want. This is, after all, why we use high level languages and not machine code. So why not take it one step further and leave format up to the reader. Store the code in an easily compilable format and let the editor format it to each reader's preference.
That's elitist bullshit.
The world could use more elitism, instead of dumbing kids down by teaching them that we should value mediocrity. Everyone gets a trophy, woo-hoo! But a job? Gee, kid - Sorry we didn't prepare you to actually compete when you get to the real world...
90% of the population of the world could easily learn to program and learn to do it proficiently.
Aahahahahaha... Oh, man, stop, ya killin' me here!
With a lot of effort, you could teach most people to use cookie-cutter VBS snippets in Excel. But programming? No. Most people not only can't program, they outright loathe the mental state programmers need to enter and stay in for hours at a time. When I describe my job (in the abstract, not talking about one specific project or domain) to most people, they cringe.
And yes I interview crapy engineers regularly.
Not really supporting your own point here - A solid C- student who managed to graduate with a STEM degree still blows the doors off the rest of society for their ability to think logically and break seemingly-intractable problems down into tiny easily-solved ones... If the flawed gemstones don't impress you, you might not want to generalize about the actual dross.
What if the purported caches of "evil spells" proves to be false?
Me too, but they were called PEEK and POKE then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Are you saying they're all simple, or that there aren't any?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Code Hero dev is a lying scammer
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.395980-Code-Hero-Kickstarter-Goes-Bad-UPDATED
and thousands of articles just google: Code Hero scam
There is already a lawsuit forming against the scammer
I suppose I'm a knuckle-dragger. After reading about interfaces and seeing a few examples where I work I still don't understand how they are beneficial.
It's Java's version of a fairly common abstraction idea, that is, fixing a set of methods/functions (and what types they consume and produce) so that one person can write code that *uses* the set and another can *implement* them, *separately* [e.g. the ubiquitous "API" of something]. Sometimes, you can get this effect (in Java) from inheritance (all Animals have a size, and a way to tell if they are hungry, etc. even if the details of fish, puppies, and snakes are different) but **because Java does not allow multiple inheritance**, the interface concept can step in to help out (so maybe we want a Pet Store, that sells both Animals and pet supplies, so we create a Sellable interface with methods like price, purchase date, etc., and we can now write an inventory system without somehow shoehorning our existing inheritance hierarchies for Animals and Supplies together into some single master hierarchy....
You do realise Gerry Garcia is dead, the Soviet Union collapsed, and prawn cocktails are not in fact sophisticated?
Oh, and if you want VHS tapes you'll need to go rummaging round charity shops.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
First we must decide whether there is a giant invisible man in the sky who made everything or we are smart monkeys. Once that is decided then we will get around to teaching children binary
Why teach a crappy, relatively more difficult language like Java to children?
And this is how any attempt to teach kids to program gets killed - every "expert" immediately jumps in and screams about how not using [insert favourite trendy programming language] will melt kids' brains and ruin them for life.
For kids' first experiences in programming it doesn't. fucking. matter. Get them enthused about programming and you can start hitting them with good practices and formalities if and when they decide to study computer science further (what subject [i]doesn't[/i] change beyond recognition when you start to study it at degree level?) The ones with any aptitude will recognise good practices and understand new paradigms when they're shown them - the ones with no aptitude will at least have learnt more about how computers work that they otherwise would have done. Anyway, by the time these kids get to college, functional programming will be "considered harmful" in favour of the latest trendy paradigm.
The difficult thing about a project like this will be getting the gameplay right so that it is both fun and educational. Crack that, and modifying it to use Python, Haskell, Javascript, Lisp, ADA, GW-BASIC, INTERCAL or Elvish Perl will be simple.
Of course, everybody knows that magic is written in FORTH.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Python joins the list of excellent languages that have whitespace requirements:
You forgot one
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
nope, its better to start off with an easy language - and that's not Java. BASIC was invented for a reason, it might be crap for us experienced programmers, but for someone completely brand new to programming, its a much more valid language to use.
The same applies to Pascal (which was invented as a teaching language) if you really, really, hate BASIC no matter what.
For this project visual basic would have been a much better choice - they currently launch a JVM that turns your spells into unityscript (did you notice it was written in Unity3D) that are executed over a socket. They could have simply run VB code directly in the system (or even VBA)
ie Python should have defined an indent as 1 tab per level of indentation. They you just set your tab to be 2 spaces or 4 spaces or 8 spaces as you like. It'd still be text-file readable so you wouldn't need a special editor.
As it is, they defined it as "some spaces" and that just helped to screw everything up. Maybe a 'tabindent' mode for the next version would help fix it.
(Joke about Mono here.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Python comes closest, but they stopped short of defining how big an indent is
PEP 8 does suggest that indents should be 4 spaces (and not an equivalent tab). If you do your best to conform to the PEP 8 guidelines, you can eliminate some of the trouble.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
A big point was made about creativity and the passion of experienced programmers. Then 40 students were recruited (how?) for an experimental study and given one hour to poke around in Java code. I don't quite see how the observations made can be interpreted as compelling evidence for the conclusions reached. Where exactly was the creativity? The game seems more like LEGO Star Wars, as opposed to just regular LEGO, with all the pieces are given. Could they make their own characters from scratch? It did not seem so.
In the late eighties and early nineties, academic software engineers were absolutely convinced OOP was the silver-bullet software development paradigm for all ills, since encapsulation (hiding methods) made code re-use practical. They also believed it was the end to all programming practices that inhibited re-use, particularly global variables.
The amusing thing is that code re-use between projects doesn't seem to have increased significantly due to OOP. We still have very tightly-bound, monolothic systems made up of multiple objects/components aggregated into large "platforms". Yes, people use a lot of prewritten platform code nowadays, but that's also the case with oldschool C-based libraries. Objects have mostly contributed a vague sort of hierarchical classification of APIs, but object classes don't ever quite equate to types due to inheritance, and there are very few actual guarantees you can make about an object class definition. At best you can say "it accepts these named/typed methods" but you can't guarantee what the effects of calling any of those methods will be.
One of the problems I have with OOP is that there is no generally-agreed fundamental definition of the exact semantics of an object. Because of that we have multiple deeply incompatible "object systems" which don't generally interoperate. The closest we have to a lingua franca on Windows is COM and that's not much. On Linux? Not even that. Compare to the situation with SQL databases - we have the relational algebra which at least defines what the mathematical semantics of a database *should* be (though this isn't ever quite implemented correctly). In objects, we don't have an algebra, so we're always at the mercy of platform implementors' changing code.
I'd like to see some serious thought about the effectiveness of the industry-wide OOP paradigm and just what the impact of it has been.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Are you saying they're all simple, or that there aren't any?
Minimizing the potential error, there's a comma missing from the GP's post. Duh! (Pointers are both simple — it doesn't take much to describe what they do — and horribly complicated — their implications run very deep indeed.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
We'll see spells like Fire.FireFactory.FireElementalBuilder.CreateElemental() and Ice.Wizardry.Spell.Hailstorm.CreateFriggingStormCloud()
Sounds like you would've been a good fit with the TUNES project which, in addition to an infinite amount of armchair pondering, would have provided something along those lines as a result of its metaprogramming goals.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Sadly, it sounds like your ideal language is COBOL. There was a great deal of interest in the nineties into computer-assisted software engineering (CASE), where you drew a diagram of the code and a machine interpreted it, but there were so many possible interpretations that the complexity grew out of control, and at last count the Unified Modelling Language had well over a hundred different diagram types. Nothing beats a formal syntax for expressive power. (Also, Slashdot doesn't have a spellchecker; you probably just got a browser update foisted on you.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's possible, I was posting that from a brand new laptop, assumed it was a change to /. probably pre-installed add-on.
Pure math is pretty much the only "language" I've never struggled with learning. I speak a little bit of Japanese and have forgotten quite a bit of German, but aside from Kanji, I struggle with learning them. I have an idea that what makes various programming languages difficult for me to pick up is related to what makes verbal languages difficult for me to pick up. Then again, I have no way to formally test that so.. meh!
I'll probably just end up falling back on C once I get to a point where I can devote some time to getting down and dirty with a language. For now it's mostly just do what I have to in order to support school work that requires some level of coding.
Imagine kids whose first exposure to programming is Java, with the standard libs as written by Sun. They will be wrecked for life..
public static void main( string args[]) .... indeed, poor things...
lets hope they use the acm.jar at least.
Yep... you seem to not like java because you don't know it (very well, which is fine, I'm a bit sucky at C myself)... no packaging or folders are needed for hello world, one extra line for the class is all.
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
I'm actually particularly good at picking up new programming languages (a little less so natural languages), so I think I have some idea about what you're facing. Learning new syntaxes and vocabularies can be quite a mental investment, especially when you're not accustomed to the process—and these aren't necessarily one in the same. I'm great at picking up new grammars and rulesets, but I could never keep up when it comes to vocabulary like physiologists or biochemists can. (And in particular, I think Kanji only persists in Japanese as a form of intentional obfuscation. It's not nearly as necessary as in Chinese. Korean has the same thing, called Hanja, and the only smart thing the North Koreans ever did was eliminate it entirely.)
That being said, though, sometimes the amount of effort required to actually pick up a language is a little deceptive. When plunged into immersion settings, it's a lot easier to justify the work. (Also, don't worry about the age thing; that's been proven to be a myth.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Actually Japanese is way easier to read and grasp in Kanji than it is without. While it does take years to master them all (and the Japanese only use around 2000 characters, much less than the Chinese), it doesn't take very long to master the most common ones. You might not be able to read a newspaper in its entirety, but you can probably handle most signs and restaurant menus. Also, since the characters are symbolic, in most cases even if you can't remember how to read the character you may still remember the abstract meaning in English (or whatever your native language is), so while you may not be able to read the word or sentence in Japanese, you may still understand it (though occasionally characters are used strictly for their phonetic properties, so this does fail at times). Hiragana and Katakana are very easy to learn (it took me about 3 days to master both character sets, approximately 100 characters total, and all of them much more simple than the average Kanji character) but they can be more difficult to read than Kanji, especially given the limited phoneme inventory in Japanese that necessitates longer words. I used to feel the same way about Kanji (that it was intentional obfuscation) until I started learning it. When I had the time, I could easily pick up 5-10 new characters a day at the start and 3-5 per day after I hit 100 or so. Granted, living in Japan for 6 years and being completely immersed in it helped. The only real problems with it (aside from the number of years it takes to learn completely) is the difficulty in inputting Kanji into a computer, especially given that there are multiple different schemes and not all of them are available on each platform.
To program Hallo World in Java only requires the creation of one file which contains one class, there is no need to create a package for it!
public class HalloWorld
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hallo World");
}
}
## Now to compile and run the program:
$ javac HalloWorld.java
$ java HalloWorld
Hallo World
$
I like that in Python you don't need to use curly brackets and semicolons like Java requires, and I am a Java developer (when I'm not pretending to be a Software Architect!).
There appears to me to be no reason why an IDE could not automatically line up indentation when copying blocks of python code - though sometimes it might need to ask for guidance.
I have taught C to experienced developers, and I had fun teaching a 10 year old to code in C. However, I think that Python & Java are better languages to start with. A couple of months ago a ten year old boy (we know his parents) phoned and said he wanted me to teach him Java - he had already got some Java books and had been reading them and trying out some GUI code.
To become as Master Programmer, you need to be fluent in at least 3 computer languages - I have written code in at least 20. I started with BASIC 45 years ago, since then I've done FORTRAN & COBOL amongst others. I also had fun with LISP and Perl (but I was never fluent in them).
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