Kid languages

coordinatedturns — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:33:03 +0000

I’ve spent the weekend trying to introduce my twelve year old brother to programming. Since he spends most of his days playing games, I’ve been curious if he’s ever considered how the games are actually made. Turns out he had, and was keen to learn, so we decided we’d write a simple game together. After lowering expectations a little (“Lets do Battlefield 3″), we settled on a simple single-player Pong/Breakout clone.

It was a bit hard coming up with a language and library. Ruby and Shoes? Squeak? Straight C and Allegro? Dig up an old copy of AMOS? Out of curiosity I settled on Processing. It’s a rapid visualization language running on the JVM that I’ve been curious about since a friend attended a conference about it in Madrid. A quick visit to processing.org and 23 megabytes later we were thrown in to a nice looking IDE. And sure enough, it’s a very nice language for rapid prototyping if you know how to program. Which seems to somewhat contradict its mission statement.

For some reason Processing borrows its semantics and syntax from Java, instead of something more prototype friendly. So it’s stuck with static typing, and an arbitrary almost-C syntax.

And that makes it so much harder to teach.

I know this is a bit like robbing a burned down house; but since teaching programming is part syntax, part algorithms, and most people will agree that the syntax part’s mostly a nuisance early on, that makes the core problem algorithmic thinking, which is indeed a difficult skill to pick up. In the paper No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks argues for the distinction between accidental and essential complexity in software engineering. And while box-ball collisions are essentially complex for a twelve year old, complex syntax is entirely accidental.

So on one hand the language has sweet features such as an implicit game loop in the draw()-construct and easy coordinate transformations. On the other hand, it forces the user to make a distinction between integers and floats (try justifying that to a twelve-year old who hardly knows what a decimal point is). And at least as important, it forces an unwarranted focus on syntax — was I supposed to put a curly bracket or a parenthesis here? Why is int in all lowercase while String is capitalized? ¹

All of these factors take away from an otherwise very enjoyable experience.

The problem with teaching programming, especially to kids, is that you need some kind of instant gratification. When I taught myself programming in Delphi at his age, it came from the VCL (which for some reason made Pascal worthwhile for me), and for some kids it’s no doubt hacking together a picture blog to show of for their friends. For my brother, it’s games. And while Processing offers this, it could be done better.

Since the language is aimed at people with little programming experience, why not take the chance to introduce something with a consistent internal syntax, such as Scheme, or at least de-cruftify it a bit, Ruby or Python style? And come on, drop the types. There are several weakly typed languages running on the JVM already, so i shouldn’t be an impossible feat to do.

I guess what I really want is advice and tips. Is there a dynamic, untyped language built specifically with graphics prototyping in mind? And in a broader sense: If you were to teach programming to a twelve year old, how’d you go at it?

¹ Another more subtle point is the occurrence of mutable state. It’s not an entirely trivial thing to encounter for the first time. This is a point beautifully illustrated in the paper The camel has two humps by Dehnadi and Borna, which studies the trials of first year computer science students in the UK and tries to derive predictors of programmer success.

Coordinated Turns?

coordinatedturns — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:16:53 +0000

Welcome to Coordinated Turns! This will hopefully act as a dumping ground for all my somewhat tech-related ramblings.

And who am I?

I’m Marcus. I currently work as a scrum master and software developer at Atex Polopoly, in Stockholm. Infrequently, I twitter under @marcusf. I have a passion for web development, software quality, theoretical computer science, control theory and, somewhat unrelated, cheese.

Some of you may know me from other places on the net. I infrequently blog about music here, and you can most certainly find me on your favorite local community.

I’m an avid mac user, with quite some previous experience in graphic design and photography, and I spend my free time on about everything from languages to music and aesthetics to signal processing, comic books and beer.

And what about the title?

A coordinated turn is a way of modeling reasonable motion in target tracking systems. In continuous time systems with cartesian velocity, the governing equations can be stated as:

The title stems from the fact that there’s a complete lack of blogging on most of my favorite topics today, and I hope to fix that. I plan on write more on everything from marginalized particle filters to the fundamental of lattice theory in the future, if any interest exists. It will, if nothing else, be a good learning exercise for myself.