Rurple NG

[ciphergoth]

I've been writing a program for teaching people how to program:

And I've blogged about it on the work blog. I start by quoting Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:

If you’ve never programmed a computer, you should. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It’s like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It’s awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

A computer is the most complicated machine you’ll ever use. It’s made of billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to.

Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they’re off-limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

Comments

[damerell.livejournal.com]

The trouble with learning to program is that there has to be something you want (or need) to do. This was a lot easier in the 8-bit days when, say, simple text adventures were obvious hobbyist projects (not that you can't write one now, but you're much more likely to when text adventures are a commonplace thing) and simple graphics were simple to do.

There's still a fair few people seem to learn some kind of programming from the desire to write a roguelike game - a roguelike remaining a practical single-person hobbyist project.

I think the other approach is what you're doing - a game with a programming environment inside it which is secretly a real programming language. Zach's Manufactoid ( http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/pivot/entry.php?id=18 ) is a similar idea with Lua which might be interesting (Windows-specific, alas). There's a bunch of robot-arena Flash games with languages specific to the game, too, but some of them have proper flow control and whatnot.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the other features of my rewrite is that it's designed to support pluggable environments - so support for a roguelike environment is absolutely a practical goal.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I sometimes have programmer's-block where I'm itching to write something new, but stuck for ideas.

I think a nice thing about game programming in general is that even if you're just doing something that isn't particularly original, it's still easy to add your own original creativity (levels, rules, characters etc).