Archive for May, 2008
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
My programming education began when I took a C language course at the local community college. I can still recall how strange I found the language's rules about when I could and couldn't use a variable (e.g. variables declared in one function can't be read or modified in others), for ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Programming | No Comments »
Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Charles Simonyi---the Hungarian notation guy---has been dating Martha Stewart for the past 15 years.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
Anti-PHP screed #34019. For those of us who've only glanced at PHP, both interesting and distrubing.
My favorite bit, though, is an in passing quote from a C course the author took: “German Umlaute don’t work in C, so don’t use them”.
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Just about everything I described in my talk about what goes wrong in education goes wrong at nearly every step in this 10-minute video. I don't mean to pick on this guy, but he's the top Google video result for "python tutorial", and that makes me sad. Sure, sure, I ...
Posted in Education, Learn Programming | No Comments »
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
Last month at LugRadio Live USA 2008 in San Francisco, I gave a talk discussing programming education and Pigeon, my learner's programming language. Videos of all the talks at LugRadio Live are going up. Below is my talk, which you can also download. (I occasionally mumble a few key words. ...
Posted in Education, Learn Programming, Programming | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
How's this for blogging on the cheap? Below is a paper I wrote for English 101 a while back. I've reworked it slightly (removed the silly Chicago citations), but it retains the stilted prose and mechanical structure of any good My First Research Paper. In any case, I'm fond of ...
Posted in Politics, Tech | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 16th, 2008
Everything said here.
I'll just add that pictorial representation of code is fundamentally flawed because it inevitably means drawing a bunch of boxes and connective lines all over the place. Just as there's no one true way to distribute your functions and classes in text, there is no true optimum 2D ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
