Comments on: Through the eyes of a newbie

By: Felix

Felix — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:19:34 +0000

Hi Rob,

i just found this blog here… cool!

i think for women – ‘natural language processing
with python’ is something interesting to start.
these are small snippet’s where you can feel
the power of programming.

mfg

By: Erik / Tistatos

Erik / Tistatos — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:46:13 +0000

I’m sorta in the same situation at school right now, taking a course in basic programming in c++ that I have to do for my degree. And I must say, the teacher and I don’t agree in much when it comes to how you should go about teaching programming. There is a lot of things I consider (at time when you first learn to program) you shouldn’t need to worry about.
And this is perhaps something you should tell your wife as well, in the beginning it’s easy to wonder and ask things as “why semicolons?”, but I believe the most important part in learning to program is to Think as a programmer: see a problem and say to yourself “how would i solve that in code?” and not “should I save this as a unsigned long it?”

thought process first, syntax later.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:40:03 +0000

To understand the for-loop syntax and the awkwardness that is pre- and post-decrement, one needs to study history a bit. In this case, the history of this part of Javascript comes from C, which comes from it being syntax sugar on top of assembly language, where you deal much more directly with hardware constructs and the fact that, for example, there are machine language pre- and post-decrement addressing modes. C was the way it was because it made more sense to those who knew assembly. Javascript is the way it is because it made more sense to those who knew C. Sadly, none of that helps it be more palatable to someone like your wife, but at least there are good reasons for it even if she’d much prefer a language without so much baggage.

By: robert

robert — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:31:27 +0000

Javascript is novice friendly? That’s the first time I heard this ;) I still like good old Pascal a lot as beginner language because it’s verbose and doesn’t have all the newbie-confusing “wtf is this?” stuff Javascript took from C. Shame there isn’t really any decent Pascal implementation around though – Pascal is really mostly good for teaching though, which was the creator’s intention and that’s why it never really established itself.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:24:16 +0000

This makes me want to convince my wife to take the python course, then maybe she can teach my energetic 2-yr to get stuck in a while loop to spend some energy :D