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Tell HN: My child's first program

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Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#133
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".

Thanks for making my day!

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#136
post #11

So. I made a deal with my kids that they could have a phone if they made an app. There's enough youtube tutorials and they're old enough to follow them. I could have helped them more over the summer, but we didn't get it done. Now ChatGPT will generate the flutter code for an app in seconds, as well as guide you with 'show me how to install flutter'. It's crazy that all the code is written for you. I tried one of the…

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

IME no - but its NLP is much better than any search engine, so it's a lot easier to get a more specific answer/example.

Vs. searching for results on StackOverflow and similar, you'd probably have to combine results on 'how to basic flutter app', 'intro to programming', 'todo list example app [perhaps not in flutter]', and even then it wouldn't be exactly what you wanted if you were looking for specific requirements.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#137
post #54
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.

My first was a car (seen from above) driving up the screen, disappearing from the top by printing empty lines below it, and then appearing from the bottom after 24 empty lines.

I thought it was the greatest trick ever. Meanwhile my brother was reimplementing every game he saw, including Tetris and some early Mario game.

Re: Tell HN: My child's first program

#138
post #41

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.

Mine are just whatever happens to be under the keyboard layout I'm using at the time. If qwerty, then `asdf`, `qwer`, `uiop`, `zxcv` are likely to be temp variable names. But since I've dabbled in other layouts, I've found the names have changed to:

- Dvorak: aoeu, htns, gcrl, mwvz

- Colemak: arst, neio, qwfp

- Mtgap: inea, htsr, dlcw, fvgj

etc...

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