91–100 of 352 posts
I guess someone from the government had just become significantly richer.
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
So if they learn Delphi, they can use some software automation to make their jobs easier, and they can easily learn another language if they turn out to be really good at this new thing. After learning an OOP language, learning a new one takes at most a week.
Professional programmers scoff at "old" languages like this, but they forget what it's like to not know the first thing about programming, or what GCC is, or how it's different from Clang, or if you need to install Linux to use it, or if you're making a huge mistake by using C++ instead of Rust, or if maybe Go is better, or why that one person said something about GraphQL, or if you need to install a virtual env for…
Old languages? Delphi is a lot newer than C. C in a mostly modern form dates from about 1977; Delphi is from 1995.
If you want to just write code in a box and have it run, maybe you should use http://sketchpad.cc/ or https://jsfiddle.net/. Or code.labstack.com, intervue.io, codepad, codiva.io, paiza.io, compilr, ideone, onlinegdb, repl.it, rextester, mycompiler, jsbin, sequential, or the other couple dozen alternatives in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co.... Or ObservableHQ, which is fucking amazing. Or try.jupyter.org. Or just your browser's JavaScript console. Or ShaderToy, where you can program in GLSL. Or Philip Guo's http://PythonTutor.com/ which can step you through the execution of simple code step by step while visualizing the stack.
And Python is five years older than Delphi, too. So it's not about disdain for old languages. Python was originally developed to be easily accessible for beginners, based on Guido's experience with ABC, which was purely a teaching language, and for some time Guido's main project was CP4E, Computer Programming for Everyone. It's moved away from that in the last 15 years or so, sadly, but some aspects of it still remain.
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
Delphi is a modern development environment. I haven't used it recently, but it was incredible in the 90s/00s and I know it kept adding features and platforms. AFAIK Beyond Compare is built with Delphi.
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
I've been toying with the idea of running a few classes to help early and mid-career adults learn to program. Although it's been so long since I first learned that I worry I'd struggle to get the basics across. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, up to date, open source, introduction to programming? Ideally something that uses an experienced programmer (i.e. me) to guide.
At this point I think it's probably a matter of "you either have it, or you don't". All of the people who succeeded "already knew" how to program, before I even showed them, or they never managed to learn.
And my experience is even with people who actually did manage to secure a programming job. In my opinion they still don't know the basics - they blindly follow "procedures" and mostly do copy/paste programming, without being able to grok the idea and why these things work the way they do..
This reminds me of a few ( I then found out that they were being taught to use Borland Turbo C . I suspect the case for this is similar: Some person who once upon a time learnt to program and then never practiced nor developed their skills somehow got a job teaching programming, and is now trying to apply the ancient tools they were taught somewhere around the time when some fish decided to walk on land because its a…
If the goal is to get more students to become programming literate, then the last thing that I would want is to pick a random flavor of the day language, with some frameworks, and some "best practices" debated to the oblivion on HN or Reddit. I would want all schools have a pretty standard system, with identical software that works identically because the goal of that software is to act as a pen and paper in a class. It needs to get out of the way.
Imagine the conversation had they picked C++ and do Linux. First, there's going to be a multi-year debate if we should be using Ubunto, Centos, Arch, until some pointy headed expert says "The future is in CoreOS!" just before everyone decides to standardize on Fedora. After that there would be a fight about versions, because everyone knows we should always run the latest. That's except for the group of people over there, that are refusing to run the latest and want to run the proven. Oh and they do not want to do C++, they hate C++ and say it should be Rust and since it is a Linux system and shadow IT is pretty easy on it, they are going to teach Rust! Or mostly argue about teaching Rust... etc... etc.. etc.
Here's a thing - if 10% of students gets out of the Delphi environment and starts messing with GCC for any reason then the program already succeeded in achieving the goal.