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The Little Coder's Predicament

whytheluckystiff.net

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Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#51

Post by gaius »

diN0bot wrote: post #15
jballanc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces. Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that interesting i…

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'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age.

I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#52

Post by danw »

The closest modern equivalent is myspace. Myspace users are encouraged to modify their profiles with custom html/css. There's existing layouts to copy and modify. Any changes are instantly visible. It's easy to share layout code with friends.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#53

Post by tsetse-fly »

gaius wrote: post #51
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'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a…

It's not as accessible as BASIC on a TI calculator, where many kids are introduced to programming. I don't think it's a coincidence that the situation was similar on Commodores/Ataris.

Deciding that you need a programming language installed and then picking one and installing it is a very big step. It was a fluke that many of the people posting in this thread discovered programming. They stumbled upon the editor, tapped out a couple lines, and something happened. Cool!

Python is certainly accessible to an experienced developer, but a 10-year-old's curiosity is superficial. They need to tinker and receive instant gratification without the barriers of setting up an environment. Programming isn't integrated and exposed in a dead-simple way to foster experimentation these days.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#54

Post by potatolicious »

thalur wrote: post #45
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.

(as a web programming novice) I think the problem with the web in this context is there are still some significant hurdles to getting set up, e.g. getting a server to host your webpages (unless you only want your friends to be able to see it when your PC is on). If you could get rid of these barriers... I think if someone could provide a browser-based all-in-one solution with language+IDE+hosting+tutorials, then that…

It's been a while since I've developed PHP on Windows, but way back in the day there was a popular package that would install PHP, MySQL, and a smattering of other things (like a GUI DB manager) in a single click. It got me started on PHP very, very quickly, and in a lot of ways I owe a lot of my coding experience to it.

Macs also now ship with PHP and Ruby, though they are sometimes broken.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#55

Post by riklomas »

snprbob86 wrote: post #49
hedgehog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We care on the XNA team as well! It's not bundled, but you can develop for your Xbox 360! http://creators.xna.com/ C# Express, Game Studio, and XNA Framework are free for personal and commercial use on Windows. Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live. The download includes a simple Platformer game "starter kit" (written by yours truly) which is perfect for g…

Why isn't it free to deploy to your Xbox and then $99 for the ability to sell your game?

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#56

Post by pygy »

njharman wrote: post #27

The BASIC of today is HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Then there are things such as http://tryruby.hobix.com/ and processing.

Both "Try Ruby" and "The little coder predicament" have been written byt the same person, namely why the lucky stiff or _why.

His main programming progress for the last two years has been Hackety Hack, a programming environment for kids, based on Ruby.

The first iteration of HH was built on top of Mozilla, but abandonned because of cross platform issues.

The next version, due this march, runs on Shoes, a GUI toolkit he developed with HH in mind.

http://hacketyhack.net/ http://shoooes.net/

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#57

Post by narag »

snprbob86 wrote: post #49
hedgehog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We care on the XNA team as well! It's not bundled, but you can develop for your Xbox 360! http://creators.xna.com/ C# Express, Game Studio, and XNA Framework are free for personal and commercial use on Windows. Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live. The download includes a simple Platformer game "starter kit" (written by yours truly) which is perfect for g…

* Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live.*

What if I don't want to sell anything? Do I still need to pay in order to write programs for a console that I own?

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#58

Post by stuartk »

I remember as a kid going into the local computer shops, getting onto a speccy or commodore and typing the immortal lines:

10 print "hello" 20 goto 10

Felt great to watch that mother scrolling!

But the first thing that kids of today will do when they get hold of a new pc, is get on internet to search for pron.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#59

Post by almost »

psyklic wrote: post #12

I miss how difficult it is to get into graphics programming nowadays. DirectX and OpenGL have somewhat high learning curves for new programmers (especially kids). Even the "simplified" graphics libraries are usually OOPified and take some learning. I miss the days of mode 13h!

> I miss the days of mode 13h!

Happy memories :) Discovering that what you see on the screen is just bytes in memory, and you can access them directly.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#60

Post by ambition »

axod wrote: post #47
neilk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but PHP limits you to web-style interactions. You have to be excruciatingly clever to get it to act like a chat server or something. And forget about doing animation or sound or anything fun .

So once you've mastered php, you move onto something more powerful. You can do tons in javascript these days also.

Right, but many beginning programmers don't want to start with something boring and move on to the fun stuff. You can't show a CGI form to your friends and have them drool over how cool it is. Instant gratification is key.
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