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

[haggis.livejournal.com]

I learned to program BASIC and loved it and I've made intermittent attempts to learn C++. I really enjoy it but I'm feeling a bit stymied at the moment. I write programs to play little puzzle games or solve little logic problems but I have difficultly with any graphical stuff, which should be straightforward in more developed languages.

Can you advise what languages would be worth looking into?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Python, no doubt about it. A beautiful, clean and simple language that's good for total beginners to programming but is also well suited to real work. There are many, many libraries for a huge variety of tasks. The program I wrote is written in Python and teaches Python. Google write everything in either C++, Java, or Python. There are things other languages do better, but you'd be very hard pressed to regret learning Python first.

Graphical stuff sadly is hard in any modern environment, but you can get very nice results out of Cairo, which is what I use for my electoral charts - in Python, naturally :-)

[haggis.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll look into it.

One of the things I wanted to make was one of those simple ecological models (sharks eat the fish so the fish population drops so the sharks die out a bit so the fish population booms) that I could make much more customisable. The logic is easy, trying to write a program to display it was such a nightmare I gave up.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

If you want to display it as a graph, the Python library "matplotlib" is not too hard to use and produces absolutely fantastic results, as well as being very flexible. A lot of my electoral charts used it.

[meico.livejournal.com]

Graphical stuff sadly is hard in any modern environment

I think Processing make grapical stuff very very easy. Simple to invoke, deploy, and with tons of great examples online. :)

[skx.livejournal.com]

One thing you might like to experiment with is javascript/html.

You can write fairly complex things that run inside a browser these days...

[meico.livejournal.com]

Add the "canvas" element and it gets really interesting. :)

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Yeah I remember when I moved from BASIC to C, it meant a less satisfying period of just amusing myself with less exciting text input/output.

I thought that Java was nice in that it includes a graphics library as standard, and it's easy just to write an Applet that you can immediately view in a browser.

In a lot of cases though, you can use many graphics libraries with many programming languages. What have you been trying so far to do graphics? I've found SDL is fairly easy to use for doing 2D game-style graphics.