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The Little Coder's Predicament

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Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#31

Post by omouse »

neilk wrote: post #21
jballanc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the Apple II+ was produced in an age where the inventors of computers envisioned everyone learning to program computers...as opposed to using them as really expensive fancy typewriters, which is essentially what most people use computers for today.

The only person who has ever had that vision, consistently, is Alan Kay. The Apple was programmable because it was made by hackers for hackers. There were a few firms that would do software consulting for corporations and institutions, but the notion of consumer software barely existed. Apple didn't mind it if a few people wrote third-party software and sold it. But I think in the beginning they expected to provide a…

>The only person who has ever had that vision, consistently, is Alan Kay.

Don't forget Ted Nelson, whose book (which I bought YAY :D) Computer Lib/Dream Machines features the slogan, "You can and must understand computers now!"

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#32

Post by tsetse-fly »

diN0bot wrote: post #13
gcheong wrote: post #3

The one thing that seems to be missing is the idea of including a programming tutorial with the pc or console. What if your XBox came with a manual called "Programming the XBox - a tutorial introduction"? When I got my Apple II+ it came with a programming manual on Apple BASIC presumably because that was part of the reason for the machine's existence - as an easily accessible platform for people to learn to program o…

iphones kinda come with a 'how to program an iphone app' tutorial, where by come with i mean the internet. presumably most of the comments here are focused more on the existence of tutorials at all, not on implementation. still, the state of open api's is growing tremendously (twitter, facebook i don't get what people are talking about. maybe that's because i'm not a video game or linux nerd. i don't like c or assemb…

People tinkering with programming don't care about APIs, they don't even know what an API is. Have you seen how much code is required for a Hello World application for the iPhone or how many people there are complaining about Objective-C's syntax?

BASIC on TI calculators is very popular among kids because they can figure out how to write a program during their math class. You don't need much reference to write a text-based game or a program to help you cheat on a geometry quiz.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#33

Post by Klonoar »

_why's made significant inroads in this area since this posting, though. Sure, there's definitely a ways to go, but Shoes is one of the best toolkits I've seen period, regardless of being aimed at children.

On the subject of game consoles and development, the PS2 did have a version of Linux where you could use it to run various things (games, scripts, programs, etc). Granted I never got to use it myself, but I recall reading that the reason Sony didn't push it too hard is that there was little to no interest in it, at least compared to the overall market.

I actually reviewed a couple different programming environments for kids about a month or two ago, over on Linux.com (http://www.linux.com/feature/155203). Bit of a shameless plug, but I figure it's somewhat relevant to the discussion at hand. shrug

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#34

Post by shiro »

jballanc wrote: post #2

While this is rather old, it's also rather timely: http://hackety.org/2009/02/05/theFundamentalLittleHackersSum... ...oh, and personally, I can relate. If it weren't for the Apple IIe in my middle-school math teacher's class room, I wouldn't be a programmer today.

Isn't this what Squeak guys are (kind of) aiming at? OLPC comes with Etoys, in which children can easily write and modify graphical apps.

What's interesting is that their environment inherently supports concurrency. If kids learn concurrent/parallel programming from the beginning, maybe they'll make better software suitable for this multicore/cloud age later.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#35

Post by GHFigs »

neilk wrote: post #21
jballanc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the Apple II+ was produced in an age where the inventors of computers envisioned everyone learning to program computers...as opposed to using them as really expensive fancy typewriters, which is essentially what most people use computers for today.

The only person who has ever had that vision, consistently, is Alan Kay. The Apple was programmable because it was made by hackers for hackers. There were a few firms that would do software consulting for corporations and institutions, but the notion of consumer software barely existed. Apple didn't mind it if a few people wrote third-party software and sold it. But I think in the beginning they expected to provide a…

Much of Alan Kay's vision in this department was inherited from Seymore Papert.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#36

Post by GHFigs »

Jebdm wrote: post #8

What about LÖVE? http://love2d.org/ It's really easy to program for; Lua is a language you can pick up without much effort. It's reasonably fast and built upon a few fairly ubiquitous libraries. Game distribution is easy (zip and change the extension to ".love"). Obviously it doesn't come pre-installed anywhere, but it's not hard to get. It would probably take a little work to make it run on game consoles, though, de…

_why on löve: A+ http://hackety.org/2009/01/29/loveInTwoDimensions.html

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#37

Post by bryn »

ojbyrne wrote: post #4

I get his point, but can't get away from the idea that he's describing the web... and php. New distribution system, larger audience, same idea.

Hmm, _maybe_ Javascript. You really need to be able to jump in and see results - visual results. The visual feedback of Logo was definitely instrumental in getting me into programming.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#38

Post by Shamiq »

scott_s wrote: post #10
ojbyrne wrote: post #4

I get his point, but can't get away from the idea that he's describing the web... and php. New distribution system, larger audience, same idea.

That seemed to the obvious answer to me. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft aren't going to open up development on their consoles because they make money off of licensing fees.

Unless they disallowed vendors from charging for games made by the "open" dev kit, thereby preserving the licensing fee.

Or just eliminate the fee in its entirety and take a slice of the revenue (or marginally larger slice).

I don't see how lowering cost of entry could be anything but advantageous to console makers.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#39

Post by hedgehog »

Klonoar wrote: post #30
hedgehog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at MS cares: MS Small Basic http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

I actually had my younger brother try this out, and it did what it set out to do very well - that is, it's very sandboxed, but at the same time gives you access to change certain things such as your desktop background, etc. Pretty well done, at least in my opinion. The one problem is that there's really nowhere to go after that - if you stay with MS tech, it's far too large of a leap to build anything larger than wha…

Definitely. Aside from that I'm not a big fan of BASIC as a starting language any more, the syntax is weird and inconsistent etc etc. Although I really like Python I think Löve (Lua) might be the best place to start now.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#40

Post by plinkplonk »

tsetse-fly wrote: post #28
diN0bot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days. as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though. there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do…

I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language. The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter sc…

" I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language."

I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on.

Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.

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