I've been re-learning programming using JavaScript on the frontend and Prolog on the backend, hoping to gradually build up a framework to do web-based strategy games, and I highly recommend it. (Ok, I'm not a child, but I am childish).
The key advantages I've found is visual programming is lots of fun, giving instant gratification which I think is important for novices of all ages. Something you can do in JavaScript which isn't easy in other languages is it's very cheap and easy to host things on the web, so easy to share with everyone.
To plug my project, a checkers game which kind of works I've put at http://www.frontiersoftware.co... and that's my development version which I work on and the new code runs every time someone refreshes the browser. The code is available at https://github.com/roblaing/ch...
The more I get into JavaScript, the more I think it's a very underestimated language.
As someone who uses gedit as his primary text editor, this is fairly disastrous news. And as someone who believes in the "the browser, the browser, and nothing but the browser" future, I've been dabbling with browser based editors, mainly CodeMirror.
But it's not quite as convenient as gedit (especially if you don't do all your development on a remote server). Does anyone else use CodeMirror, or have suggestions for a better modern editor in the web world?
Years ago I went to a presentation by Andy Grove where he said something I found very profound, but I've never seen quoted which I've always considered "Grove's law". I'll paraphrase it as "the cost of receivers equals the cost of the transmitter".
He explained that if you compared the price of a television broadcasting equipment to TVs, you roughly got a correlation between the number of TV stations vs TV sets based on their relative prices. Similarly, if you compared the cost of radio broadcasting equipment to radios, the same thing (which explained why got a lot more radio stations than TV stations since both the broadcasting and reception equipment is cheaper).
Looking at internet servers vs browsers, the hardware costs are nearly identical, making the internet nearly a "one-to-one" medium. I'm not sure if it has actually panned out this way given the predominance of a few big internet "broadcasters" like google and facebook with huge server farms, but I still love the theory.
Right now, Rs are registered as Ds to vote for Sanders. Otherwise he wouldn't even stand a chance in the primaries.
As an outsider to the US political system, I've been wondering how much "gaming" there is by people voting up opposition politicians they think strengthen their real choice's chances of ultimately winning. It seems a dangerous strategy, because Ds registered as Rs voting for Trump may find the joke is on them if he becomes president.
Often in GT there are questions where you will have something where the end question would be "How would the captain share the 100 gold pieces among his 5 sailors?" Obviously the biggest d-bag in the entire world would keep 95 and share only 5. This or something very close to it would be the answer most of the time.
The pirate captain wouldn't be where he is if he squandered 5 gold pieces -- he only sacrifices 2 to his 4 crew to prevent a mutiny and pockets the remaining 98. It's an old puzzle with its own wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sadly, it very accurately explains how CEO pay works.
Not every technology that the author listed are programming languages. X10, Insteon, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are communication protocols for interconnected devices.
Kudos to the article for introducing me (for one) to those above technologies. They might indeed be insecure (according to AC comments not backed by any references) but at least now I'm aware of them and can read up about them.
Frankly I'm surprised that/. doesn't seem interested in home automation technologies.
Sadly a lot of comments, in this threat at least, harken to a very small town, parochial view.
While everyone seems to agree the 12 selected programing languagnes are bad, I haven't seen too many suggestions of improvements.
I found the omission of AutoLISP odd since it certainly seems to have been the main language of 3D printing a while back.
Agreed, PostScript is essentially an implementation of Forth and naming the parent language would have been smarter.
SVG is supported by most browsers these days, but doesn't seem to have taken off in a big way for some reason. I still see it as an important technology one day.
What are the suggestions for what the list should have contained?
I encountered R via Johns Hopkins University's data science series of Coursera courses which I highly recommend. The first one is at https://www.coursera.org/learn...
As a mainly Python programer, but someone with an eclectic interest in programing languages (I enjoy Prolog, Lisp, ML...), I've found R very intriguing: it's a very "functional" programing language, but also object oriented (using dollar signs instead of the customary dots). I've also found R to be incredibly quick -- provided you know and use the right builtin functions. I once tried to solve an assignment with a for loop and killed the process after it hadn't finished within a day. Using "aggregate" did the job within an instant of pressing enter.
I've found R to have numerous strange quirks I haven't got the hang of, resulting in weird results sometimes which I can't debug. The Coursera course mentioned above teaches a style of R I'm not particularly fond of using various libraries, which I'm ideologically opposed to in the same way I prefer battling with JavaScript directly rather than learning JQuery as an intermediary "dialect".
What are your pointers for the "right way" to program in R?
If I had received an email to wire $100000 from a company executive I'd surely call up and verify.
These scams work best in extremely hierarchical organisations where underlings are trained to blindly follow orders and to be terrified of questioning their boss. The target organisation also needs to have a culture of dishonesty, else how could a boss demand that an underling wire them money without a valid invoice? Sounds to me like organised crime got taken by a petty crook.
it's not just been devalued, but made illegal. you publish a link to something, and you can be made to be responsible for what is at the end of that link, even if what is there is different from what was there when you publish the link.
Here in South Africa, we unfortunately have a sad example of one of our few honest, hard working politicians losing her job over a facebook link http://www.politicsweb.co.za/n...
I think the goals here are highly commendable, and keeping it programming language agnostic is pragmatic because whatever you learn today is going to be BASIC in a few years. While I concede the authors have a lot more experience at teaching than I do, I disagree with the ordering of the big ideas and suggest my own priority below.
Big Idea 3: Data and Information
What has turned me into a programmer is having to deal with data in my job. The MooCs on this tend to focus on languages like R and SQL to solve problems too big for spreadsheets to handle. Admittedly, this might be too "real world" for a school syllabus, but I've become convinced data-driven programming is the best way to keep things practical. Once you deal with manipulating real world data, concepts like data types follow naturally.
Big Idea 2: Abstraction
I'm a big fan of the "How to Design Programs" school which is unfortunately strongly-tied to a Lisp-dialect Racket. But the fundamental ideas apply to all programming languages. Step one for any novice programmer should be to state clearly what data types their functions are reading in and returning. Teaching test driven development from day one is also fantastic.
Big Idea 4: Algorithms
Once you have some first hand experience at the slow speed amateurish attempts to handle big data crunching leads to, the importance of this becomes clear. Here I find Python a great language because R and SQL do too much "under the hood" to make the design decisions understandable.
Big Idea 6: The Internet
Where does data come from? There's no way to access data these days without knowing the HTTP request library of whatever programming language you are using. Furthermore, hopefully everything soon will be done via a browser. So students should learn from day one how to use browser-based text editors, lints, storage managers like git etc.
Big Idea 1: Creativity
This is where games are great. Everyone enjoys games, and programming games is the best way to learn. Perhaps placing this first comes from pedagogical experience, but I suspect it's best left until pupils have a bit more know-how of what's doable at their skill level.
Big Idea 5: Programming
The best way to understand how programming languages work is to write your own mini-DSL interpreter. This is generally regarded as a very advanced topic, but is actually quite simple given the great MooCs covering it these days.
Big Idea 7: Global Impact
The cool thing nowadays is once pupils have created a web-based game, it's available to the world. This does entail becoming a JavaScript ninja.
Note, Vodacom (sorry, I mean its fall guy employee) did it "to try and figure out who her sources were within the company". Vodacom probably assumed the deep throat would be dumb enough to use his company phone, and can track incoming and outgoing calls from its network.
Speaking as a "MooCaholic" (I've done dozens, and highly recommend Rice University's Python series), the contrast with a traditional university course was recently brought home to me when I was asked to be an external examiner. The traditional university course had the advantage of paying actual money, but I'm still on the side of MooCs as far as educating students goes.
Between doing my paid for marking, I was doing "free" peer reviewing for Coursera's Data Analysis series which I'm busy on (which I also highly recommend), and it struck how much the students doing a traditional university course would learn if they marked each others' papers as is done on MooCs instead of oustsourcing this job to an external "expert". I've found the marks you get from the peer review process in MooCs to be a bit of lottery -- sometimes I think I get unfairly low marks, other times overly generous marks. But the main thing is by comparing assignments I've recently done to those of other students, I sometimes get an epiphany as in "why didn't I think of that" and other times "you fell into a trap I avoided". (Incidently, I found this helped in the external examiner gig in that I first wrote the given assignment myself, and then ranked students according to whether they did better or worse than me -- and many thought of things I didn't).
Something the Data Analysis course doesn't do, but which other MooCs do which is an excellent idea, is to get people to grade their own assignment after comparing them to other students' work.
An advantage MooCs have is most sensible people doing them actually want to learn stuff rather than get "statement of accomplishment" in the hope of landing a job. So the peer grading system falls apart with people just wanting to be top of the class without learning anything. But if I were an employer, I'd focus on people motivated enough to do MooCs, though I doubt many corporate HR departments are that enlightened.
I have some first hand experience at this. More years ago than I care to remember, I designed and self published a game (just googled it and came with an entry for it at Board Game Geek at https://boardgamegeek.com/boar...)
It was a very educational experience and lots of fun, but you have to treat it as a hobby. Nowadays, I'm striclty into putting games up via the web -- no printing costs, no distribution problems (uhm, also no money... made or lost)
Surely freedom of speech (a constitutional right just about everywhere except North Korea) trumps corporate bullshit? What nauseates me is the way this poor dude has been brainwashed by his employer. Surely he should be able to sue the socks of this shitty corporation if he said nothing that was untrue or "secretive"?
I find it strange Ruby is never mentioned in the interview since my impression of Ruby is "object oriented Perl" and I'd guess many of the web application type things traditionally done in Perl have migrated to Ruby.
I recall reading a while back a journalist recorded Bobby Kennedy claiming there was a Chinese curse that went "may you live in interesting times" at Johannesburg airport, which he researched and suspected Kennedy had invented.
A google search brings up a speech he gave to students later at the University of Cape Town which is online at http://rfkcenter.org/day-of-af...
The relevant part goes:
There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
As someone who enjoys programming computers to play strategy games (I highly recommend the General Game Playing MooC at https://www.coursera.org/cours... for anyone else interested in this hobby), I do concede artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it's a match for natural stupidity. But AI is not all BS.
While I have no idea how Google's algorithms work, this does sound suspiciously similar to the old Emacs game Eliza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) whose original programer Joseph Weizenbaum created it as a joke he later regretted when people though it really was psycoanalyzing them. Eliza demonstrated a few lines of code can easily give an impression of artificial intelligence, especially if it randomly generates the occasional snarky comment.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been re-learning programming using JavaScript on the frontend and Prolog on the backend, hoping to gradually build up a framework to do web-based strategy games, and I highly recommend it. (Ok, I'm not a child, but I am childish).
The key advantages I've found is visual programming is lots of fun, giving instant gratification which I think is important for novices of all ages. Something you can do in JavaScript which isn't easy in other languages is it's very cheap and easy to host things on the web, so easy to share with everyone.
To plug my project, a checkers game which kind of works I've put at http://www.frontiersoftware.co... and that's my development version which I work on and the new code runs every time someone refreshes the browser. The code is available at https://github.com/roblaing/ch...
The more I get into JavaScript, the more I think it's a very underestimated language.
As someone who uses gedit as his primary text editor, this is fairly disastrous news. And as someone who believes in the "the browser, the browser, and nothing but the browser" future, I've been dabbling with browser based editors, mainly CodeMirror.
I'm generally very impressed with CodeMirror (website https://codemirror.net/) used in conjunction with with a Node package at https://www.npmjs.com/package/...
But it's not quite as convenient as gedit (especially if you don't do all your development on a remote server). Does anyone else use CodeMirror, or have suggestions for a better modern editor in the web world?
Years ago I went to a presentation by Andy Grove where he said something I found very profound, but I've never seen quoted which I've always considered "Grove's law". I'll paraphrase it as "the cost of receivers equals the cost of the transmitter".
He explained that if you compared the price of a television broadcasting equipment to TVs, you roughly got a correlation between the number of TV stations vs TV sets based on their relative prices. Similarly, if you compared the cost of radio broadcasting equipment to radios, the same thing (which explained why got a lot more radio stations than TV stations since both the broadcasting and reception equipment is cheaper).
Looking at internet servers vs browsers, the hardware costs are nearly identical, making the internet nearly a "one-to-one" medium. I'm not sure if it has actually panned out this way given the predominance of a few big internet "broadcasters" like google and facebook with huge server farms, but I still love the theory.
Right now, Rs are registered as Ds to vote for Sanders. Otherwise he wouldn't even stand a chance in the primaries.
As an outsider to the US political system, I've been wondering how much "gaming" there is by people voting up opposition politicians they think strengthen their real choice's chances of ultimately winning. It seems a dangerous strategy, because Ds registered as Rs voting for Trump may find the joke is on them if he becomes president.
Often in GT there are questions where you will have something where the end question would be "How would the captain share the 100 gold pieces among his 5 sailors?" Obviously the biggest d-bag in the entire world would keep 95 and share only 5. This or something very close to it would be the answer most of the time.
The pirate captain wouldn't be where he is if he squandered 5 gold pieces -- he only sacrifices 2 to his 4 crew to prevent a mutiny and pockets the remaining 98. It's an old puzzle with its own wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sadly, it very accurately explains how CEO pay works.
Not every technology that the author listed are programming languages. X10, Insteon, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are communication protocols for interconnected devices.
Kudos to the article for introducing me (for one) to those above technologies. They might indeed be insecure (according to AC comments not backed by any references) but at least now I'm aware of them and can read up about them.
Frankly I'm surprised that /. doesn't seem interested in home automation technologies.
Sadly a lot of comments, in this threat at least, harken to a very small town, parochial view.
While everyone seems to agree the 12 selected programing languagnes are bad, I haven't seen too many suggestions of improvements.
I found the omission of AutoLISP odd since it certainly seems to have been the main language of 3D printing a while back.
Agreed, PostScript is essentially an implementation of Forth and naming the parent language would have been smarter.
SVG is supported by most browsers these days, but doesn't seem to have taken off in a big way for some reason. I still see it as an important technology one day.
What are the suggestions for what the list should have contained?
I encountered R via Johns Hopkins University's data science series of Coursera courses which I highly recommend. The first one is at https://www.coursera.org/learn...
As a mainly Python programer, but someone with an eclectic interest in programing languages (I enjoy Prolog, Lisp, ML...), I've found R very intriguing: it's a very "functional" programing language, but also object oriented (using dollar signs instead of the customary dots). I've also found R to be incredibly quick -- provided you know and use the right builtin functions. I once tried to solve an assignment with a for loop and killed the process after it hadn't finished within a day. Using "aggregate" did the job within an instant of pressing enter.
I've found R to have numerous strange quirks I haven't got the hang of, resulting in weird results sometimes which I can't debug. The Coursera course mentioned above teaches a style of R I'm not particularly fond of using various libraries, which I'm ideologically opposed to in the same way I prefer battling with JavaScript directly rather than learning JQuery as an intermediary "dialect".
What are your pointers for the "right way" to program in R?
If I had received an email to wire $100000 from a company executive I'd surely call up and verify.
These scams work best in extremely hierarchical organisations where underlings are trained to blindly follow orders and to be terrified of questioning their boss. The target organisation also needs to have a culture of dishonesty, else how could a boss demand that an underling wire them money without a valid invoice? Sounds to me like organised crime got taken by a petty crook.
it's not just been devalued, but made illegal. you publish a link to something, and you can be made to be responsible for what is at the end of that link, even if what is there is different from what was there when you publish the link.
Here in South Africa, we unfortunately have a sad example of one of our few honest, hard working politicians losing her job over a facebook link http://www.politicsweb.co.za/n...
I think the goals here are highly commendable, and keeping it programming language agnostic is pragmatic because whatever you learn today is going to be BASIC in a few years. While I concede the authors have a lot more experience at teaching than I do, I disagree with the ordering of the big ideas and suggest my own priority below.
Big Idea 3: Data and Information
What has turned me into a programmer is having to deal with data in my job. The MooCs on this tend to focus on languages like R and SQL to solve problems too big for spreadsheets to handle. Admittedly, this might be too "real world" for a school syllabus, but I've become convinced data-driven programming is the best way to keep things practical. Once you deal with manipulating real world data, concepts like data types follow naturally.
Big Idea 2: Abstraction
I'm a big fan of the "How to Design Programs" school which is unfortunately strongly-tied to a Lisp-dialect Racket. But the fundamental ideas apply to all programming languages. Step one for any novice programmer should be to state clearly what data types their functions are reading in and returning. Teaching test driven development from day one is also fantastic.
Big Idea 4: Algorithms
Once you have some first hand experience at the slow speed amateurish attempts to handle big data crunching leads to, the importance of this becomes clear. Here I find Python a great language because R and SQL do too much "under the hood" to make the design decisions understandable.
Big Idea 6: The Internet
Where does data come from? There's no way to access data these days without knowing the HTTP request library of whatever programming language you are using. Furthermore, hopefully everything soon will be done via a browser. So students should learn from day one how to use browser-based text editors, lints, storage managers like git etc.
Big Idea 1: Creativity
This is where games are great. Everyone enjoys games, and programming games is the best way to learn. Perhaps placing this first comes from pedagogical experience, but I suspect it's best left until pupils have a bit more know-how of what's doable at their skill level.
Big Idea 5: Programming
The best way to understand how programming languages work is to write your own mini-DSL interpreter. This is generally regarded as a very advanced topic, but is actually quite simple given the great MooCs covering it these days.
Big Idea 7: Global Impact
The cool thing nowadays is once pupils have created a web-based game, it's available to the world. This does entail becoming a JavaScript ninja.
Death by PowerPoint. A presentation that takes 99 slides to make its point its clearly pointless.
I suspect the paypal billionaires get their AI views from Dilbert
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-...
She could choose another wireless company?
Note, Vodacom (sorry, I mean its fall guy employee) did it "to try and figure out who her sources were within the company". Vodacom probably assumed the deep throat would be dumb enough to use his company phone, and can track incoming and outgoing calls from its network.
Trolls would never consider anything Microsoft does to be a successful.
Nonsense! I thought Windows 9 was fantastic and gave it rave reviews everywhere.
Speaking as a "MooCaholic" (I've done dozens, and highly recommend Rice University's Python series), the contrast with a traditional university course was recently brought home to me when I was asked to be an external examiner. The traditional university course had the advantage of paying actual money, but I'm still on the side of MooCs as far as educating students goes.
Between doing my paid for marking, I was doing "free" peer reviewing for Coursera's Data Analysis series which I'm busy on (which I also highly recommend), and it struck how much the students doing a traditional university course would learn if they marked each others' papers as is done on MooCs instead of oustsourcing this job to an external "expert". I've found the marks you get from the peer review process in MooCs to be a bit of lottery -- sometimes I think I get unfairly low marks, other times overly generous marks. But the main thing is by comparing assignments I've recently done to those of other students, I sometimes get an epiphany as in "why didn't I think of that" and other times "you fell into a trap I avoided". (Incidently, I found this helped in the external examiner gig in that I first wrote the given assignment myself, and then ranked students according to whether they did better or worse than me -- and many thought of things I didn't).
Something the Data Analysis course doesn't do, but which other MooCs do which is an excellent idea, is to get people to grade their own assignment after comparing them to other students' work.
An advantage MooCs have is most sensible people doing them actually want to learn stuff rather than get "statement of accomplishment" in the hope of landing a job. So the peer grading system falls apart with people just wanting to be top of the class without learning anything. But if I were an employer, I'd focus on people motivated enough to do MooCs, though I doubt many corporate HR departments are that enlightened.
Anyone else find it suspicious how all posts like the above have been voted down?
I have some first hand experience at this. More years ago than I care to remember, I designed and self published a game (just googled it and came with an entry for it at Board Game Geek at https://boardgamegeek.com/boar...)
It was a very educational experience and lots of fun, but you have to treat it as a hobby. Nowadays, I'm striclty into putting games up via the web -- no printing costs, no distribution problems (uhm, also no money ... made or lost)
> I know some employers who get a bit twitchy if they know that you have journalists uin your social circle away from work.
It get worse: not only do corporations trample over freedom of speech, they trample over freedom of association.
Whatever government's courts don't tell Nintendo to f-off for firing him.
Surely freedom of speech (a constitutional right just about everywhere except North Korea) trumps corporate bullshit? What nauseates me is the way this poor dude has been brainwashed by his employer. Surely he should be able to sue the socks of this shitty corporation if he said nothing that was untrue or "secretive"?
I find it strange Ruby is never mentioned in the interview since my impression of Ruby is "object oriented Perl" and I'd guess many of the web application type things traditionally done in Perl have migrated to Ruby.
"invade Greece" is such an ugly term for "bank foreclosure" which all responsible lenders have to eventually resort to sometime.
I recall reading a while back a journalist recorded Bobby Kennedy claiming there was a Chinese curse that went "may you live in interesting times" at Johannesburg airport, which he researched and suspected Kennedy had invented.
A google search brings up a speech he gave to students later at the University of Cape Town which is online at http://rfkcenter.org/day-of-af...
The relevant part goes:
There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
As someone who enjoys programming computers to play strategy games (I highly recommend the General Game Playing MooC at https://www.coursera.org/cours... for anyone else interested in this hobby), I do concede artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it's a match for natural stupidity. But AI is not all BS.
While I have no idea how Google's algorithms work, this does sound suspiciously similar to the old Emacs game Eliza (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) whose original programer Joseph Weizenbaum created it as a joke he later regretted when people though it really was psycoanalyzing them. Eliza demonstrated a few lines of code can easily give an impression of artificial intelligence, especially if it randomly generates the occasional snarky comment.