Scratch

150 pages of BYOB 3 discussion isn't bad.... though perhaps we should wait until the official Snap! release before starting a new thread.

Scatcycle wrote:

Bring your own bombs?

How did you guess?

rookwood101 wrote:

14God wrote:

joefarebrother wrote:

What we need is a feature to turn a script into a list of blocks.

I agree

Elaborating on this idea, do you mean that say for example you were building a script in the byob interface, you could have a "[List blocks in script()]"?

No, like i mean if you had

(the script {
  move (10) steps
  if <<touching [mouse pointer]> and <mouse down>>{
     some custum block
     set [var] to (4)
  }
  run ((script) of (clone))
 })

this block would turn it into

(list (the script {
          move (10) steps
        }) (the script {
               if <<touching [mouse pointer]> and <mouse down>>{
                  some custum block
                  set [var] to (4)
               }
            }) (the script {
                    run ((script) of (clone))
                }))

Last edited by joefarebrother (2011-10-05 14:28:05)

C? Ouch, that's a tough one. I found its lack of flexibility completely frustrating.

14God wrote:

...because my mom is skeptical about me not learning Spanish.

I agree with her!  You should learn C and Spanish.  Computer languages are great but human languages are important too.  Here in Europe everybody speaks three or four languages and it's embarrassing being an ignorant American.  (I speak English and French, but that's not much by European standards.  If you'd been born in Switzerland you'd have spoken three languages right out of the box.)

And I wish I spoke Spanish in particular because in some parts of the US it's become the majority language.  Not in Berkeley, but it's a pretty close second to English.  I wish I spoke Chinese, too.

shadow_7283 wrote:

I found its lack of flexibility completely frustrating.

Interesting.  Some people complain that C is too flexible.  You can take a pointer to any data type and cast it into a pointer to any other data type.  You can cast an integer into a pointer and then dereference it, to refer directly to a specific memory address.

The notation is a little obscure, though, I grant you.

ssss wrote:

I speak part Japanese, a little italian, a little french and a little spanish.  Is that enough?

Given your Scratch name, you should probably learn Parseltongue next. 

bharvey wrote:

ssss wrote:

I speak part Japanese, a little italian, a little french and a little spanish.  Is that enough?

Given your Scratch name, you should probably learn Parseltongue next. 

I already learnt that.

@Bharvey, I still have the opportunity to start next year if I change my mind but for now I see little use for me to learn Spanish and I can't bring myself to be interested in it. If I can't see myself using something, I usually can't focus on it. In Europe, countries are smaller and speak a great variety of languages, its more practical for them to learn many langauges then it is for me. I do hear that learning another language is a good experience that makes your mind more flexible so I do intend on learning another language some time soon, but this year I'd like to start learning C and want more time to focus. I also don't like the pressure of grade based motivation on such a new and difficult concept for me so as long as I'm not officially in Spanish class I'm fine with self motivated/self paced study.

In summary: Need time for C, still plan to learn Spanish, C is priority.

Last edited by 14God (2011-10-07 14:14:37)

bharvey wrote:

14God wrote:

In summary: Need time for C, still plan to learn Spanish, C is priority.

Lo que flota su barco.

Thank god for google 

14God wrote:

In summary: Need time for C, still plan to learn Spanish, C is priority.

Suggestion: Rethink about learning C, but maybe Python or Perl or Ruby. These will have much more applications in the real world, are better than C (Sorry, everyone says so    ), and have some qualities of OOP (Ruby is epic).

Personally, I think C is garbage, which sits with C++ and Java in my dumpster, getting ready to be compressed and thrown into the landfill.

EDIT: Something to look at: Python vs. Perl vs. C++

Last edited by Sidharth (2011-10-08 13:42:29)

Sidharth wrote:

Personally, I think C is garbage, which sits with C++ and Java in my dumpster, getting ready to be compressed and thrown into the landfill.

D: Java isn't garbage.

Minecraft = awesome

Minecraft = Java

Therefore, Java = awesome

Sidharth wrote:

Personally, I think C is garbage, which sits with C++ and Java in my dumpster, getting ready to be compressed and thrown into the landfill.

<Sigh.> The language wars, round 17.

[Retyping because when I hit "submit" after five paragraphs the hotel told me my free half hour was used up.    ]

1.  The golden rule of learning about computer programming: It's not about learning more languages.  There's still plenty for you to learn about BYOB, let alone the other languages you know.

1.5.  And, if you do want to learn another language, you should pick one outside your comfort zone.  So for example if you know Python and Javascript and you're trying to decide between Ruby and Java, what you really should learn is Prolog, which will teach you about declarative (logic) programming, not just another notation for the same old ideas.

2.  I don't much like C++ or Java either, because I think they incoherently try to be at both a low and a high level of abstraction.  But that criticism doesn't apply to C, which, imho, does a brilliant job of filling a particular niche: a low-level language that exposes the organization of data in memory to the programmer via pointers, which are an important nontrivial idea, even if not on the same level as lambda.     If you want to write a memory manager or a device driver, C's just the ticket.

2.5.  So you might want to learn C in the context of learning about Machine Organization, which is a substring of the titles of several good books such as this one.

3.  What else might you learn instead of another language?  There's Data Structures and Algorithms, there's Computer Graphics, there's Discrete Mathematics, or even Programming Languages, which isn't learning a particular language but learning how languages are implemented.

Sidharth wrote:

I wrote:

Personally, I think C is garbage, which sits with C++ and Java in my dumpster, getting ready to be compressed and thrown into the landfill.

Sorry if I didn't elaborate. I was generalizing and comparing these languages to Python, Perl, and Ruby based on how easy they would be to learn, and the range of possibilities of applications.

bharvey wrote:

If you want to write a memory manager or a device driver, C's just the ticket.

Heh, maybe if novice programmers (ME) wrote device drivers 


@rookwood101: THANK YOU! Minecraft uses way too much physical memory! Not necessary. Think about other PC games, they don't destroy your computer if it only has 2GB of RAM. The Java VM is not an option for 3D gaming.

Your welcome    normal pc games would make me worry if they were using 2GB of my 8GB of ram, but minecraft does that all the time.. which is VERY annoying. Although I can imagine the problem is much worse if all you have is 2Gb    I'm not really in trouble with 8