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Tell HN: My child's first program

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Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#51

Post by jrootabega »

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…

In a class where we were writing a parser for math expressions, this was my plausible deniability scenario when I named the functions whose job was to analyze characters. Looking back, I'm sure the teachers were not at all amused.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#52

Post by dugmartin »

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

I did this probably too many times in Radio Shacks as a kid, using a word with one less letter (along with a space to generate a nice diagonal pattern on the screen).

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#53

Post by jvm___ »

ericmcer wrote: post #42
jvm___ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

2 hours of coding for an experienced dev

Sure, building a table is a two hour job for an experienced wood-worker.

If a grade 7 student can make an app by - Describing what they want it to do - Copy/pasting some code - And running it.

That's a leap forward in my books.

The first barrier to making apps has been the time involved in to learn the syntax, if that's gone in the first days of this app, what's next? Do we teach how to write code anymore, or just to read and understand it?

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#54

Post by ct0 »

rumpope wrote: post #37

My son took a coding class in elementary school (MIT scratch), and he came in one day and told his teacher that his Dad was a "pro programmer" and had helped him. The program was a pigeon farting on a man's head. The teacher asked what Dad had helped with, and he said "he recorded the fart sound".

All programmers have to start somewhere. My first program was an interactive piece of concrete.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#55

Post by kiliancs »

Hedy https://www.hedycode.com/ has worked very well with my kids. It starts as an extremely simple language, minimizing friction, provides good examples and exercises, and gradually adds more and more to the language. Finally, it tells you that with just a couple minor changes, you have now learned Python.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#57

Post by [deleted] »

taylodl wrote: post #41
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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#58

Post by nonrandomstring »

My girl's favourite saying at the moment is "command not found". That's the thing she reads the most, except on the occasion it does something. Walking around the house saying it gave way to answering back to requests with "command not found daddy". What have I unleashed?

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#60

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

jansan wrote: post #44
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I got thrown out of Currys (UK electrical store) aged 11 for doing that with

10 PRINT “Welcome to Currys the electrical ripoff store”

20 GOTO 10

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