Archive for the ‘Learn Programming’ Category
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
Continuation of previous post...
1) No inner classes: no classes as static members, no classes as instance members, no local classes, no anonymous classes. The advantages of these constructs are:
Documents that the class is used only by its enclosing class.
Allows access to enclosing members in certain cases.
More convenient than writing the ...
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Sunday, February 25th, 2007
In previous posts, I introduced the idea of an alternative syntax for Java designed for educational purposes, which I'm calling PygeonJava. The design is still in progress, but here are some tentative ideas, most of them attempts at reducing learner confusion about the resolving of named things (i.e. identifying what ...
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Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
The need for an educational alternative syntax for Java is less compelling than for C, assuming, at least, that Java is not the first language learners are being exposed to. Not to say that Java is particularly easy---it's gotten rather baroque rules, in particular, surrounding inheritance, access, and generics---but it's ...
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Sunday, February 11th, 2007
I considered many candidates for function declaration syntax. Imagine we want to declare a function named 'foo' that returns int and has three parameters, x, y, and z. Here are some of the candidates I considered:
func foo:int x:int y:short z:char
func foo:int params x:int ...
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Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
First off, I've made a couple more decisions about Pygeon syntax:
The assignment operator is the keyword a (standing for 'assign'), not the symbol = . So an assignment looks like (a foo 3) // assign 3 to variable 'foo' . The = symbol in math is not actually an operator, ...
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Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Syntax doesn't matter: any good programmer works with multiple languages over their lifetime, most of these languages expressing basically the same ideas in mostly arbitrarily different ways; any serious student of programming will come to the same conclusion once they learn their third or fourth language.
I've seen this in another ...
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Saturday, January 27th, 2007
The most common oversight in beginning-programming education is that most instructors and most books fail to emphasize the concept of expressions. From my own learning experience and from talking to classmates, it's very rare, for instance, for learners to think of the of the function name in a call as ...
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Sunday, January 14th, 2007
One thing I've had on the drawing board for a while is a new educational programming language, which I'm calling 'Pygeon'---pronounced 'pigeon', but spelled with a 'y' in honor of its Python heritage. The design of Pygeon reflects one key principle: conveniences are confusing for learners, as they cloud the ...
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Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
My provider, SiteGround, seems to have had a bit of a catastrophe over the weekend. My databases stayed in tact just fine, but it seems my account directory got scrapped. It seems they restored from a quite old backup because the wiki remained in tact except for some modifications I ...
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Friday, November 3rd, 2006
Here's the first of the MediaWiki tutorials. You'll find the remaining 12 parts by searching for "mediawiki" on revver.com.
revver(91522)
Also, it turns out you can download revver videos in .MOV format. The quality doesn't seem to be better, but you can view the video fullscreen this way.
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