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Tell HN: My child's first program

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Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#41

Post by taylodl »

belthesar wrote: post #34
xyzelement wrote: post #32

I love the variable names. I definitely had the same naming conventions as a kid :) Funny story. Sophomore year at college, I worked at a dev shop, and I was the first person to set up version control there (CVS... it was like year 2000.) The next day I reviewed changes that were merged and variables $tit and $ass were all over the place. I assumed the guy who checked it in was just immature and met w him to "profess…

As a kid? When writing stupid scripts, I frequently use `fart` as a variable name to this day. I'm a staunch supporter of naming variables intentionally in software that lives, but I'm definitely not above doing a `fart=True; while fart: ...` in temporary repl work. Maybe I'm just eternally 10 years old, haha.

I must be old-fashioned! My variable names in throwaway programs tend to be x, y, and z and my iteration variables tend to be i, j, and k.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#42

Post by ericmcer »

jvm___ wrote: post #30
highfrequency wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the ChatGPT sample code/tutorials much better than the tutorials that can be found on Google?

Create me a flutter app that has a list of todo items. Each item has a timer. The list shows one item at the top and when it's timer finishes the next one in the list moves to the top. That prompt, or something like it, generated Futter code along with the instructions of how to modify a default flutter app for the code to work. I haven't ran the code yet, but all the other code samples I asked for worked. Asking for…

That is what though, 2 hours of coding for an experienced dev? And the trade off is you have no context over the code running your product?

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#43

Post by andai »

belthesar wrote: post #34
xyzelement wrote: post #32

I love the variable names. I definitely had the same naming conventions as a kid :) Funny story. Sophomore year at college, I worked at a dev shop, and I was the first person to set up version control there (CVS... it was like year 2000.) The next day I reviewed changes that were merged and variables $tit and $ass were all over the place. I assumed the guy who checked it in was just immature and met w him to "profess…

As a kid? When writing stupid scripts, I frequently use `fart` as a variable name to this day. I'm a staunch supporter of naming variables intentionally in software that lives, but I'm definitely not above doing a `fart=True; while fart: ...` in temporary repl work. Maybe I'm just eternally 10 years old, haha.

In college, usually a few minutes before an assignment was due, I'd frantically Ctrl+F the project for various curse words.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#44

Post by jansan »

bombcar wrote: post #13
d--b wrote: post #10

Show her how to loop through the print statement and she’ll be hooked forever!

I suspect some major portion of computer programmers discovered loops via 10 PRINT "FARTS" 20 GOTO 10

Every Commodore 64 in every department store that I went to was running that loop (but with "Hello") after I left.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#45

Post by bitwize »

I've always said that most kids my age got the programming bug with something like the following:

    10 PRINT "FARTS"
    20 GOTO 10
And it's as good a start as any other. Probably better since it drives home the idea that the computer follows your orders, even to the point of breaking taboos.

There was an intro to computers book from the 80s that was written entirely this way. Its first example Pascal program concatenated the strings FAR, TIN, and G, yielding FARTING. When they wanted to introduce machine language and assembly language, they invented a pretend instruction set and an assembler for it, calling it the Simple, Excellent for You Assembler, or SEXY ASS.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#46

Post by olav »

belthesar wrote: post #34
xyzelement wrote: post #32

I love the variable names. I definitely had the same naming conventions as a kid :) Funny story. Sophomore year at college, I worked at a dev shop, and I was the first person to set up version control there (CVS... it was like year 2000.) The next day I reviewed changes that were merged and variables $tit and $ass were all over the place. I assumed the guy who checked it in was just immature and met w him to "profess…

As a kid? When writing stupid scripts, I frequently use `fart` as a variable name to this day. I'm a staunch supporter of naming variables intentionally in software that lives, but I'm definitely not above doing a `fart=True; while fart: ...` in temporary repl work. Maybe I'm just eternally 10 years old, haha.

Nice. I vividly remember the days, sometimes in the 80s, in some university cellar, hacking away at our green-lit vt terminals connected to some vaxens, that one of the other regulars in the room and I used temp variables _hudli_ and _tralla_ as some kind of ritual.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#48

Post by olav »

olav wrote: post #46
belthesar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a kid? When writing stupid scripts, I frequently use `fart` as a variable name to this day. I'm a staunch supporter of naming variables intentionally in software that lives, but I'm definitely not above doing a `fart=True; while fart: ...` in temporary repl work. Maybe I'm just eternally 10 years old, haha.

Nice. I vividly remember the days, sometimes in the 80s, in some university cellar, hacking away at our green-lit vt terminals connected to some vaxens, that one of the other regulars in the room and I used temp variables _hudli_ and _tralla_ as some kind of ritual.

Ah, "hudli hudli" stands for "Extraordinarily fast guitar playing" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hudli - it's only now that I look this up

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#50

Post by scrumper »

Now to suck the joy out of it for her by giving her a code review and a lecture about I18N :)

I like that the code itself is almost poetic, and is in itself a statement about the problem domain. Knuth would be proud.

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