But on the other hand of your flipside... so what? There are other ways to get it to "just work", and Alan Kay spent a lot of time looking at that. "teach turtle a new word". Good abstraction.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
1975 called and they want their very out of date quotes back.
Actually, this is only one from a series of "definitions" Dijkstra made for a humorous glossary of computer languages on an old mailing list.
Seriously, that comment was made in 1975, when the state of the art in BASIC was more or less "goto". By 1982, BASIC variants with proper named functions and procedures existed. It also reduced the impact of line numbers drastically with the "RENUMBER" command which renumbered and tracked gotos and gosubs (excluding computed gotos). That was BBC Basic.
By 1988 QuickBasic 4.5 was released (later adapted to be qbasic), which contained proper nested blocks, and made line numbers completely optional. I'm sure there were earlier versions doing such things (certainly earlier versions of QuickBasic), but many people here will be familiar with this one and its derivatives.
The system alluded to in the summary/question is an Apple ][ BASIC emulator. It is not BBC BASIC. It is not QuickBasic. Apple ][ BASIC. With emulated Apple ][ display hardware. This is not something that will grab kids' attention.
Besides, there comes a point when either you've changed BASIC to such a point that it's not BASIC any more, or it's a clumsy morass of different tagged-on paradigms.
Is BASIC still BASIC if you add an INCLUDE keyword? The fundamental paradigm of BASIC was that of the monolithic code block. Even GOSUB subroutines didn't have a fixed entry point -- only a fixed RETURN point.
Doing stuff early on with maps and filters is a better way of getting kids' attention, as all of a sudden, you're doing a lot of work in next to no time at all.
I really don't like Gamemaker. The presence of a GUI doesn't immediately make something "visual". They failed to abstract away the most unnatural parts of code, and then hidden away crucial parts of the logic. Why do you have to use a "score" object for your lives? Renaming numerical variables as "score" has no benefits whatsoever, because the default action (set) runs counter to our understanding of scores. Scores may be increased, they may be decreased, and they may be set to zero. The idea of arbitrarily resetting a score to any old number doesn't fit with our intuitive understanding of what a score is.
By the time these kids grow up, "programming skills" will be obsolete, same as slide rules became obsolete a generation ago. Let the kids be kids, and concentrate on the basics. There are too many supposedly intelligent adults here on slashdot who still can't tell the difference between "brake" and "break", "rain", "reign", and "rein", etc.
"Let the kids be kids"?!?!? Are you serious? What is it that makes arithmetic suitable for kids? Baby chimpanzees don't do it -- it's something we've created, and we teach because we believe it has value.
Spelling may be an issue (in no small part because English is a stupid language*) but using that as a catchall excuse for dropping [[insert name of subject here]] from the curriculum has no logical grounding. The problem with English language lessons is not that they're too short, it's that the techniques used are ineffective. There is no benefit to be had in having longer badly taught lessons.
The problem in this thread isn't "teach teh k1dz teh c0d3z" but the insistence of the original poster of using a buggy implementation of an obsolete language (that wasn't even a good language in its heyday) simply because it's "her baby". OK, maybe not just that. It's "I learnt this way, so this way must be best" syndrome -- the same idea that caused resistance to the phasing out of other obsolete technologies like slide-rules, log tables and abacuses. Just because something was part of one person's education doesn't mean it is fundamental to the education process. All too often we learn in spite of teaching rather than because of it.
[ * I teach foreigners** English for a living, and I have to keep shrugging my shoulders about the sheer mindlessness of the spelling system. ** "foreign" has nothing to do with "reign", but some idiot a couple of hundred years ago thought it did, so changed its spelling to match. Mindlessness. ]
That's a trivial point. Yes, you can make any screen do pukey stuff if you want. But as it stands, people find VR pukey not because of trippy psychadelia and whatnot, but because the world goes all wobbly on them due to the lag between head movement and change of picture. That is inherently pukey.
Sorry -- I hadn't noticed you'd moved the goalposts. The previous poster was talking about project accountability, not about products. You gave an example of a non-product, and I pointed out it was pretty well accounted for. Maybe you should have reread what you were replying to before criticising me....
The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example.
Except it doesn't mean that at all. It means possessing a particular property. This, of course, was my point with "sanctimonious". It's a very broad suffix and is sometimes used for a thing that causes something, but not only.
The antonym of "nauseated" is "nauseating" -- compare with "tired" and "tiring".
The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.
The problem with pedantry is that it's almost always wrong.
But the downside of that is that your viewport render is going to need to have a heck of a lot of pixels (tilt will get very blurry if you don't supersample the viewport) which means a high render time, which is another potential source of lag.
The secret to success may actually be to step back several generations in terms of graphical quality so that the 3D render time is negligible. Get a lagless Wolfenstein or Doom going, then build forward from there.
If its just the fluids on the ears, people should be able to get accustomed to the change. Astronauts do.
Given the ratio of applicants to vacancies, space programmes can afford to be selective. I seriously doubt anyone with serious motion sickness would ever be accepted for astronaut training.
We've had hundreds of years of sailing the seas, and the observation is that people's capacity to get over seasickness is minimal. Sailors adjust by compensation strategies (breathing techniques, moving about more/less etc), not by becoming more accustomed.
Which was not too bad 20 years ago. 200fps on a 60Hz display didn't necessarily make you puke, if the software kept your reasonably oriented.
It is about the content. You can say it isn't till you are blue in the face. With a perfected VR environment you could still fuck it up with pukey content.
No, seriously, it's about the tech. First up, you can't get 200fps on a 60Hz display -- it maxes out at 60fps, aka 60Hz.
Secondly, when you're looking at a screen, you're looking at a screen. When your head moves, the screen doesn't. The image might not react optimally to your fingers, but it certainly reacts to your head.
But once the screen is strapped to your head, you are pretty much immersed. You have no physical real-world point of reference, and your brain does get confused. I once piloted a ship at night, and sadly the AC generator on board has a tendency to run slow (about 45Hz, I think). There was visible flicker in your peripheral vision below decks. But the worst bit was the compass-card on the helm. You couldn't see the flicker, but persistence of vision coupled with the motion of the boat left it floating around in front of my vision like a circular ghost with numbers around its edge. I got so sick that I couldn't leave the deck for the next 8 hours, and had to be excused from my next watch.
Very good eyeball tracking should be enough -- if you can triangulate what distance the eyes are focusing on, depth of field would be a breeze in a binocular headset.
Or my favorite: Don't use commas, which aren't needed. But I haven't seen such lists of bogus definitions.
I'm against artificial rules, but at the same time, I recognise that all writing is artificial. We need to have sensible conventions, and I wish we spent more time teaching punctuation conventions at school, because nonsensical commas split sentences badly. The basic rule is simple: never use a comma where you wouldn't naturally pause in speech -- this shouldn't really be contentious. The contentious cases are where there is a pause but the word after implies a pause/The contentious cases are where there is a pause, but the word after implies a pause.
It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.
How can it be "expanded" if it has always been that way? Besides, the verb "nauseate" is so rare as to be negligible, and without the verb form to support it, the past-participle-derived adjectival form is non-intuitive.
We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.
We should be selective about what we care about, or we risk wiping out good changes, such as when teachers reversed the death of person conjugations -- see restoration comedies for invariant "was" in the past tense, for example.
If we are talking about hardware kickstarters, or book kickstarters, or anything which involves manufacturing, if they do not have a working prototype yet it is always a risk to invest in it. If they have a working prototype and the money is only to pay for low rate initial production then the risk is low.
Looking at their project page, it really seemed like they had a prototype. They had lots of pictures taken with their "really fast" prototype. Which was presumably actually an updated V1 unit, and not actually a prototype of the new one at all. This puts them in a nasty position legally. They claimed to have a functional prototype. They appeared to be displaying an actual cased prototype. They gave every indication of being further on than they really were.
The fundamental problem with Kickstarter is that there's no accountability for handling the money.
Only if you completely, and entirely, miss what it's used for. If someone wants to set up a kickstarter equivalent where projects must be independently audited, project plans validated, and investors have some legally watertight form of ownership as well as power to intervene then they are welcome to set it up.
Here's one of the projects highlighted on Kickstarter's frontpage: Help send The Kinsey Sicks to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! They want ~$24,500 to go to and perform at a Festival. They aren't trying to sell a product, they are asking fans to help them. Some of the higher pledges include getting a CD or some such. Why on earth does a project like this need drowning in bureaucracy (the lack of which is what you claim is Kickstarter's weakness) because some other people naively think Kickstarter is a zero risk pre-order store?
I'm pretty certain that their budget is well-costed, because they know up-front the cost of flights, accommodation, venue hire etc etc etc. No design, no R&D, no prototyping, no retooling. The costs are easily identified and easily audited. You, perhaps, are the one who is missing the point.
Slashdot Mirror
But on the other hand of your flipside... so what? There are other ways to get it to "just work", and Alan Kay spent a lot of time looking at that. "teach turtle a new word". Good abstraction.
the question invariable is: which BASIC? Which of the zillion dialects are we discussing here?
Discorunner is a multi-dialect BASIC interpreter... that supports... erm... 1 dialect. Apple ][ BASIC. Yuk.
But learning programming teaches process thinking, which is an invaluable skill.
Boys are social too. They flock around like birds, climbing on things together and throwing things at each other.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
1975 called and they want their very out of date quotes back.
Actually, this is only one from a series of "definitions" Dijkstra made for a humorous glossary of computer languages on an old mailing list.
Seriously, that comment was made in 1975, when the state of the art in BASIC was more or less "goto". By 1982, BASIC variants with proper named functions and procedures existed. It also reduced the impact of line numbers drastically with the "RENUMBER" command which renumbered and tracked gotos and gosubs (excluding computed gotos). That was BBC Basic.
By 1988 QuickBasic 4.5 was released (later adapted to be qbasic), which contained proper nested blocks, and made line numbers completely optional. I'm sure there were earlier versions doing such things (certainly earlier versions of QuickBasic), but many people here will be familiar with this one and its derivatives.
The system alluded to in the summary/question is an Apple ][ BASIC emulator. It is not BBC BASIC. It is not QuickBasic. Apple ][ BASIC. With emulated Apple ][ display hardware. This is not something that will grab kids' attention.
Besides, there comes a point when either you've changed BASIC to such a point that it's not BASIC any more, or it's a clumsy morass of different tagged-on paradigms.
Is BASIC still BASIC if you add an INCLUDE keyword? The fundamental paradigm of BASIC was that of the monolithic code block. Even GOSUB subroutines didn't have a fixed entry point -- only a fixed RETURN point.
Doing stuff early on with maps and filters is a better way of getting kids' attention, as all of a sudden, you're doing a lot of work in next to no time at all.
>shudder<
I really don't like Gamemaker. The presence of a GUI doesn't immediately make something "visual". They failed to abstract away the most unnatural parts of code, and then hidden away crucial parts of the logic. Why do you have to use a "score" object for your lives? Renaming numerical variables as "score" has no benefits whatsoever, because the default action (set) runs counter to our understanding of scores. Scores may be increased, they may be decreased, and they may be set to zero. The idea of arbitrarily resetting a score to any old number doesn't fit with our intuitive understanding of what a score is.
Almost entirely agree, but there's a lot of astronomy that can be done even with the naked eye.
In the old days, the best way to teach programming with basic started and finished with LOAD "C"....
By the time these kids grow up, "programming skills" will be obsolete, same as slide rules became obsolete a generation ago. Let the kids be kids, and concentrate on the basics. There are too many supposedly intelligent adults here on slashdot who still can't tell the difference between "brake" and "break", "rain", "reign", and "rein", etc.
"Let the kids be kids"?!?!? Are you serious? What is it that makes arithmetic suitable for kids? Baby chimpanzees don't do it -- it's something we've created, and we teach because we believe it has value.
Spelling may be an issue (in no small part because English is a stupid language*) but using that as a catchall excuse for dropping [[insert name of subject here]] from the curriculum has no logical grounding. The problem with English language lessons is not that they're too short, it's that the techniques used are ineffective. There is no benefit to be had in having longer badly taught lessons.
The problem in this thread isn't "teach teh k1dz teh c0d3z" but the insistence of the original poster of using a buggy implementation of an obsolete language (that wasn't even a good language in its heyday) simply because it's "her baby". OK, maybe not just that. It's "I learnt this way, so this way must be best" syndrome -- the same idea that caused resistance to the phasing out of other obsolete technologies like slide-rules, log tables and abacuses. Just because something was part of one person's education doesn't mean it is fundamental to the education process. All too often we learn in spite of teaching rather than because of it.
[ * I teach foreigners** English for a living, and I have to keep shrugging my shoulders about the sheer mindlessness of the spelling system. ** "foreign" has nothing to do with "reign", but some idiot a couple of hundred years ago thought it did, so changed its spelling to match. Mindlessness. ]
That's a trivial point. Yes, you can make any screen do pukey stuff if you want. But as it stands, people find VR pukey not because of trippy psychadelia and whatnot, but because the world goes all wobbly on them due to the lag between head movement and change of picture. That is inherently pukey.
Sorry -- I hadn't noticed you'd moved the goalposts. The previous poster was talking about project accountability, not about products. You gave an example of a non-product, and I pointed out it was pretty well accounted for. Maybe you should have reread what you were replying to before criticising me....
The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example.
Except it doesn't mean that at all. It means possessing a particular property. This, of course, was my point with "sanctimonious". It's a very broad suffix and is sometimes used for a thing that causes something, but not only.
The antonym of "nauseated" is "nauseating" -- compare with "tired" and "tiring".
The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.
The problem with pedantry is that it's almost always wrong.
Are you feeling suitable self-righteated now?
Ah, I think I get it now. You are sanctimonious, so I am sanctimoniated. That's how it works, right?
But the downside of that is that your viewport render is going to need to have a heck of a lot of pixels (tilt will get very blurry if you don't supersample the viewport) which means a high render time, which is another potential source of lag.
The secret to success may actually be to step back several generations in terms of graphical quality so that the 3D render time is negligible. Get a lagless Wolfenstein or Doom going, then build forward from there.
Weed makes people vomit. Where I grew up, it was called a "whitey" (because first you went white as a sheet, then you threw up).
When the term VR entered the popular imagination, it meant stereoscopic 3D.
If its just the fluids on the ears, people should be able to get accustomed to the change. Astronauts do.
Given the ratio of applicants to vacancies, space programmes can afford to be selective. I seriously doubt anyone with serious motion sickness would ever be accepted for astronaut training.
We've had hundreds of years of sailing the seas, and the observation is that people's capacity to get over seasickness is minimal. Sailors adjust by compensation strategies (breathing techniques, moving about more/less etc), not by becoming more accustomed.
Which was not too bad 20 years ago. 200fps on a 60Hz display didn't necessarily make you puke, if the software kept your reasonably oriented.
It is about the content. You can say it isn't till you are blue in the face. With a perfected VR environment you could still fuck it up with pukey content.
No, seriously, it's about the tech. First up, you can't get 200fps on a 60Hz display -- it maxes out at 60fps, aka 60Hz.
Secondly, when you're looking at a screen, you're looking at a screen. When your head moves, the screen doesn't. The image might not react optimally to your fingers, but it certainly reacts to your head.
But once the screen is strapped to your head, you are pretty much immersed. You have no physical real-world point of reference, and your brain does get confused. I once piloted a ship at night, and sadly the AC generator on board has a tendency to run slow (about 45Hz, I think). There was visible flicker in your peripheral vision below decks. But the worst bit was the compass-card on the helm. You couldn't see the flicker, but persistence of vision coupled with the motion of the boat left it floating around in front of my vision like a circular ghost with numbers around its edge. I got so sick that I couldn't leave the deck for the next 8 hours, and had to be excused from my next watch.
Very good eyeball tracking should be enough -- if you can triangulate what distance the eyes are focusing on, depth of field would be a breeze in a binocular headset.
Or my favorite: Don't use commas, which aren't needed. But I haven't seen such lists of bogus definitions.
I'm against artificial rules, but at the same time, I recognise that all writing is artificial. We need to have sensible conventions, and I wish we spent more time teaching punctuation conventions at school, because nonsensical commas split sentences badly. The basic rule is simple: never use a comma where you wouldn't naturally pause in speech -- this shouldn't really be contentious. The contentious cases are where there is a pause but the word after implies a pause/The contentious cases are where there is a pause, but the word after implies a pause.
It is completely legitimate to prefer that people use nauseated over nauseous as the expanded definition of the latter to include the former can hinder communication and cause confusion.
How can it be "expanded" if it has always been that way? Besides, the verb "nauseate" is so rare as to be negligible, and without the verb form to support it, the past-participle-derived adjectival form is non-intuitive.
We certainly should care about our language and quoting dictionaries at people who do so is a high form of anti-thinking which just discourages people from caring.
We should be selective about what we care about, or we risk wiping out good changes, such as when teachers reversed the death of person conjugations -- see restoration comedies for invariant "was" in the past tense, for example.
I believe Doom's specific problem was the head wave. I seem to recall it feeling like your head was trapped on an infinity-shaped Scalextric track...
If we are talking about hardware kickstarters, or book kickstarters, or anything which involves manufacturing, if they do not have a working prototype yet it is always a risk to invest in it. If they have a working prototype and the money is only to pay for low rate initial production then the risk is low.
Looking at their project page, it really seemed like they had a prototype. They had lots of pictures taken with their "really fast" prototype. Which was presumably actually an updated V1 unit, and not actually a prototype of the new one at all. This puts them in a nasty position legally. They claimed to have a functional prototype. They appeared to be displaying an actual cased prototype. They gave every indication of being further on than they really were.
Only if you completely, and entirely, miss what it's used for. If someone wants to set up a kickstarter equivalent where projects must be independently audited, project plans validated, and investors have some legally watertight form of ownership as well as power to intervene then they are welcome to set it up. Here's one of the projects highlighted on Kickstarter's frontpage: Help send The Kinsey Sicks to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! They want ~$24,500 to go to and perform at a Festival. They aren't trying to sell a product, they are asking fans to help them. Some of the higher pledges include getting a CD or some such. Why on earth does a project like this need drowning in bureaucracy (the lack of which is what you claim is Kickstarter's weakness) because some other people naively think Kickstarter is a zero risk pre-order store?
I'm pretty certain that their budget is well-costed, because they know up-front the cost of flights, accommodation, venue hire etc etc etc. No design, no R&D, no prototyping, no retooling. The costs are easily identified and easily audited. You, perhaps, are the one who is missing the point.