Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Little Coder's Predicament

whytheluckystiff.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#91

Post by gaius »

diN0bot wrote: post #84
tsetse-fly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i understand the advantage of scripts. my sister loves python now because she can munge csv files much faster now (she's a scientist) api's allow people to do cool things. they're libraries. kids would find programming on a calculator much more tiresome if they had to write the multiplication method first. i guess tinkering with a calculator is fun, but that seems kind of old school, and also pretty narrow (in my day…

I reckon a smart kid with a couple of days work could have an IM bot that his friends could chat to, and all the kids are into IM now, doing cool stuff that impresses your friends is powerful encouragement to take it further. Even those kids with calculators were doing it to impress other geeks...

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#92

Post by skenney26 »

Learning to program now is easier than ever before.

Last week my partner was in Spanish class and the teacher told her that the most important languages to know in the future will be English, Spanish, and a programming language. Programming is the new literacy. She decided she wanted to learn to program. We opened up Terminal on her Mac laptop, typed "python", and used Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python as a guide. Done.

With a PC you at least have access to JavaScript (and Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript tutorial) which is more than suitable for a first language.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#93

Post by bmunro »

DLWormwood wrote: post #66
Create wrote: post #50

As a general note, consumers are not supposed to fiddle with the product , since customizations are supposed to be sold as services related to the mass market item. Exploration and learning should be restricted as much as possible (see Digital Restrictions Management, and the Right to Read). But then again, dumbing down consumers does fire back in the end... So when users do finally get to program, the supported way…

I know you're being flippant, but there really is a critical underlying problem with making everyday technology intentionally arcane. If people are unable to easily learn how something works, they will, for all intents and purposes, treat things as black boxes or "magic" and learn to distrust them (and those who do understand them) when things go wrong. This problem isn't unique to computing. My father grew up in an…

"I've seen kids who vehemently deny that meat comes from animals."

Going off topic...

There is no chance of my kids not knowing where meat comes from. I often use the words beef/cow or pork/pig etc interchangeably.

e.g. "What's for dinner tonight?" "Chopped up bits of cow."

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#94

Post by dmoney »

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…

It's not bundled

I think that's _why's point: the language needs to be bundled, so that programming feels to the newbie like a natural extension of exploring their system. Otherwise, not many will take the leap. It's like the difference between free and $.01.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#95

Post by dmoney »

potatolicious wrote: post #54
thalur wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

I believe you're talking about XAMPP: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#96

Post by tsetse-fly »

diN0bot wrote: post #85
gaius wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is a matter of perspective. If you're a kid and your family has a Mac you just sit down and type python and you're in. Whereas how many 10 year olds even today have graphing calculators? Do kids even use calculators any more or is it all "new maths"?

gaius, you and i are on the same wavelength. the old skool calculators and video games is actually a very narrow approachability (as someone who never had either nor was much interested in either), but is significantly more present on this site. however the new skool method--macs for trendy teens and college folk, or processing for artists, or good old scratch and alice for young kids--is much more present seizure-in…

You believe it's skewed because it doesn't fit your particular model of world. The fact is, an entire generation of hackers got their start through tinkering on a gaming console in their pre-teen years.

I think you're just so out of touch with how a 10-year-old learns that you can't comprehend what the article is addressing. A kid that age doesn't pick up programming the same way that a person in their 20's does. He's still mastering reading, figuring out the fundamentals of his operating system, and making real-world analogies for objects on his computer that you might already have at 24. He doesn't understand what an algorithm is, he doesn't even really know what a programming language does or what role it plays. He doesn't know algebra.

Most kids are not scholarly. They don't seek out information and work through tutorials. They're never going to hear about alice/scratch/squeak/LÖVE. They stumble upon things and their curiosity drives them, but their attention span is relatively small. They do things because they're fun and not because they want to learn.

When you began programming you probably read books and tutorials, followed-up on documentation, and relied heavily on examples. Learning through your teenage years is evolutionary. It's almost all trial-and-error at that stage. Computers are a incredibly complex place to start, that's why so many of these anecdotes are about programming BASIC.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#98

Post by Andys »

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…

Thats 99 dollars more than a kid has or is able to spend.

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#99

Post by jrockway »

wallflower wrote: post #72
riklomas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps). I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sh…

The solution is to jailbreak your phone, or get and develop for an open alternative, like OpenMoko (or perhaps Android).

Re: The Little Coder's Predicament

#100

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

wallflower wrote: post #72
riklomas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps). I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sh…

With Android, there are no barriers at all to setting up the SDK, creating an application, and installing the application on your own phone via USB. You can even go so far as to build and distribute the .apk packages to let anyone in the world install your application on their own Android phone. In fact, if you don't care about the Market at all, you can simply release, distribute, or even sell your application on your own to customers, and they have the ability to get your app onto their phone as easily as downloading it through their Android Browser.

The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.

Post reply on HN