Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Here's some nice paragraphs recycled from an old crappy post no longer worth reading.
In C, the conceptual and syntactical distinction between definitions and declarations is blurred. This is a prime example of a misguided attempt at conceptual unity in design.
I think what goes on in designers' heads is that they ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Steve Yegge on Perl
UPDATE: Oops, apparently it's from 2004. Still good, though.
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2008
The state of educational programming languages.
Ideally, a proper programming education would start with a thorough discussion of how data is represented as bits, followed by a brief tour of encryption, compression, information theory, data structures, search/sort algorithms, and machine architecture. Unfortunately, students are just too impatient to start their education ...
Posted in Education, Learn Programming, Programming | No Comments »
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
In discussions of programming education, the argument is often made that learning to program shouldn't be made easier. This is the Let's Filter Out the Idiots argument, common also to the fields of law and medicine (or so I'm told). The idea, basically, is that the discipline must retain a ...
Posted in Education, Programming | No Comments »
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Most Java instruction materials fail to make certain basic things as clear as they could be, so here's a FAQ-like rundown.
What are the types of values in Java?
Java divides its types into what it calls 'primitive' and 'reference' types (this terminology is unique to Java):
The primitive value types consist ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Programming | 2 Comments »
Friday, July 27th, 2007
I point out this post not to comment on its subject but just as an example of Python code and to remark that the otherwise pretty and compact Python syntax is blighted by a few things:
The 'self' as the first parameter of every class method is cluttery and is ...
Posted in Programming | 3 Comments »
