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

[lovingboth]

You've seen opencores.org, haven't you?

The one slightly critical comment I'd make on this is that the first line should say '.. how to program in Python', but I haven't played with it properly yet.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

No, it's programming I mean to teach; Python is just the choice I've made for what to teach. Though one of those people programmed a little before, a long time ago, so it's more of a rediscovery.

[lovingboth]

Hmm, when I think about introducing programming to JA, it's doing it via starlogo-ng or possibly Forth driving a Mindstorms robot. But that's probably me...

The former means not having to answer 'Why do some words have to have (parentheses) at the end?' with 'Because that's what Python insists on', just a very intuitive (YMMV) graphical IDE where you put building blocks in the place you want and get very graphical results. Does it do the indenting of source for you? If not, that's another thing I'd need to explain, etc.

The latter means a very interactive environment where you're encouraged to factorise and reuse short definitions.

This doesn't stop me being very impressed with it and I accept seven year olds may well not be your target audience :)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It does indent source for you, but you still need to explain it. I agree that the parentheses are frustrating, but as I say in the blog post the payoff is that people start off using a language that they won't have to throw away when they get more sophisticated.