51–60 of 308 posts
Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/
CodinGame https://www.codingame.com/games
Squeak http://squeak.org/
Logo (even in browser https://turtleacademy.com/)
JsFiddle if you want to go for somewhat longer javascript https://jsfiddle.net/
Alice http://www.alice.org/
I agree with the blog author, and I still think it's the best language to learn programming. Everything else is software engineering, and gets in the way of the instant gratification that got so many of us hooked on programming.
What's wrong with starting with BASIC like I did, writing increasingly complex code, getting frustrated with the resulting spaghetti, then learning to use GOSUB more, which then gets you ready for a procedural language like Pascal? At least this way you know why pros don't code in BASIC. The same path of frustration (and fun) can also be used to go from Pascal to an OO language like Python or Ruby.
My favorite thing about this story is that Basic was meant to be used exactly this way, for getting new programmers off the ground. And like everyone, I've got fond memories. We had an IBM PS/2 80286, with a whole megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard drive, and MS-DOS three point something. At some point, I discovered that it had Basic, but it didn't have a graphical editor. It had edlin, which was still enough to…
I agree- we should also have just as easy of a way to start off with drawing. Why do we need to install 50 frameworks, tell a window how to spawn, basically create a universe just to start experimenting with creating computer graphics? It's a (Width x Height) matrix of RGB values-- why can't we get a simple way to create a simple 100x100 box for kids to draw in? No reason your son couldn't tell a screen to print colo…
Logo! Logo + basic were my entree into programming
Logo is cool because you see the things you tell the little cursor to draw being drawn-- how could a kid implement something like his son's program, though, where a user is prompted to type their name and hit enter-- then a smiley face is drawn if their name is noah and a sadface is drawn if their name is anything else?
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JS is a fantastic language for teaching the basics of programming - introducing variables, flow control, etc. The problem is that as soon as you go beyond "write a series of statements and run them" and in to actually trying to write something interesting and fun with a little abstraction or actual software design then JS very quickly stops being a good choice. You can quickly hit synchronicity problems, weird scopin…
As soon as you get to iterate over an array, you will be confronted with JavaScript's ugly design. No. It's a language to scare - and scar - young programmers for life.
myArray.forEach( (item) => {
// process item
});
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I agree with your complaints about QBasic but I disagree a bit about JavaScript. You are totally right that the environment being right there in the browser is great. But if you press F12 right now you'll find an amazing complex dialog box -- as a professional you just implicitly skip over that complexity. And JavaScript is a significantly more difficult language than QBasic even if it's one of the simpler profession…
Have you looked at Scratch?
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JS is a fantastic language for teaching the basics of programming - introducing variables, flow control, etc. The problem is that as soon as you go beyond "write a series of statements and run them" and in to actually trying to write something interesting and fun with a little abstraction or actual software design then JS very quickly stops being a good choice. You can quickly hit synchronicity problems, weird scopin…
As soon as you get to iterate over an array, you will be confronted with JavaScript's ugly design. No. It's a language to scare - and scar - young programmers for life.
true == 1 → true
true == "1" → true
false == 0 → true
false == "0" → true
false == undefined → false
false == null → false
null == undefined → true
"\t\r\n" == 0 → true
"\t\r\n 16 \t\r\n" == 16 → true
"\t\r\n 16 \t\r\n" == "16" → false
var a = "foobar"
var b = typeof a → 'string'
var c = a instanceof String → false
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I agree with your complaints about QBasic but I disagree a bit about JavaScript. You are totally right that the environment being right there in the browser is great. But if you press F12 right now you'll find an amazing complex dialog box -- as a professional you just implicitly skip over that complexity. And JavaScript is a significantly more difficult language than QBasic even if it's one of the simpler profession…
>But if you press F12 right now you'll find an amazing complex dialog box -- as a professional you just implicitly skip over that complexity. That observation is fascinating to me. Isn't it possible that we're judging it with adult eyes? To me, kids can filter out "ui complexity" that's not relevant to whatever exploration they are doing. Examples I think of: A microwave oven[1] might have 25 separate buttons on it b…
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Not quite 100% the same, but Python + QML comes pretty close, or once support for composite templates finally lands Python + GTK3.
It's always Python+X somehow, where X is a whole different thing you have to learn to get a fraction of the whole thing shipped in Python. Keep I.T. simple - teach the kids BASIC.
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Not quite 100% the same, but Python + QML comes pretty close, or once support for composite templates finally lands Python + GTK3.
It's always Python+X somehow, where X is a whole different thing you have to learn to get a fraction of the whole thing shipped in Python. Keep I.T. simple - teach the kids BASIC.
In Python it'd look like
@GtkTemplate("my_window.ui")
class MyWindow:
@GtkChild my_textbox
@GtkCallback
def button_clicked(self, btn):
my_textbox.text = "Hello, World!"