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Why kids don't program

johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com

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Re: Why kids don't program

#91

Post by lepht »

aaronz3 wrote: post #24

I remember growing up I was playing on the Internet and found a 10 chapter book online for QBASIC. I printed it out and had it scattered all over the floor, and in no time at all I was writing code that actually did things. I had never written code before and I was in elementary school (9 or 10?). Eventually this led to html, javascript, php, VB, C#, etc. Dad wasn't real thrilled when he realized I used all of the pr…

You should check out Chipmunk BASIC [1]. Nice simple BASIC interpreter that runs natively in Mac OS X and includes basic graphical functions.

[1]http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/

Re: Why kids don't program

#93

Post by lisper »

It's important to keep in mind that one of the reasons it was "easier" to program back in the day is that you had so many fewer options. The flip side of not having to install anything is not being able to install anything. BASIC was cool, but once you hit its limits (which was very easy to do) you were kinda screwed. Sure, you could learn machine language, but that was a lot harder than running Python or Javascript.

Re: Why kids don't program

#94

Post by asyazwan »

billybob wrote: post #66
johnaspden wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me feel really sad. My epiphany was your iron curtain coming down. I can see how. In fact I had the same reaction initially (and my parents are graduates, but they don't know the first thing about maths, so they were no help to me either). I have no idea why I wrote the program to plot a circle that made it obvious what sin and cos were. In fact I think I might have misremembered my own story. I had a ZX81…

"The upcoming generations of programmers and mathematicians are going to be Gods. How could they not be with a library like that!" ...because they also have lolcats? Seriously, there are a lot more distractions these days, too.

Not just LOLCAT, DailyWTF, etc. but also HN, Slashdot, etc. Not just I waste a lot of time reading the articles, I probably waste more on reading the comments... while keep delaying work at hand.

Re: Why kids don't program

#95

Post by turtle4 »

swannodette wrote: post #43
turtle4 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that it is that much harder now. Boot your mac, open a terminal, type python, and start programming. Does it take one more step? Maybe, but it is a joke to say that is somehow more difficult.

Show me a tutorial on Python graphics on OS X that doesn't require installing an external library or learning about a really complicated graphics framework (Quartz 2D) and I'll believe what you just wrote. Apple basic graphics was one of two commands: GR or HGR

Very well. See http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/resources/k12/index.html for a tutorial that demonstrates the use of the 'turtle' built in module in python. Turtle has a long history of being a simple graphical environment to introduce programming to young individuals, and that hasn't changed over the years. It would meet the original post author's requirements for graphing those simple functions.

Assuming you are targeting those -slightly- older, pyglet would offer an incredibly simple way to progress, but would require you download one library, which I feel is a very reasonable requirement.

Re: Why kids don't program

#96

Post by asciilifeform »

axod wrote: post #74

Javascript is pretty much the new BASIC for kids these days. 10 print "BAH" 20 GOTO 10 for(i=0;i

Barring grotesque hacks, Javascript (and the entire standard WWW stack) will neither emit sound nor write to a disk. Not to mention the inescapable "If InternetExplorer Then CrappyWorkaround" abominations which come with web programming.
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