I have been programming in a "learn-by-doing" fashion for almost 2 years now and I consider myself fairly good however, I really wish to build a good foundation of Computer Science/Computer Engineering and most people recommend I start off with SICP. (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
I wished to know
Is this the best way to go about it?
I know how to code a matrix-multiplication in OpenMP and MPI and I know college level math, is this sufficient to read and appreciate SICP?
Instead of this, can I just spend all my time working on Project Euler instead?
A personal experience: Like you I am trying to learn programming by self-study and I started off with SICP. As I am a ancient historian and archaeologist, I have no background in maths, engineering or real computer science (just good knowlegde in stuff like LaTeX, HTML and CSS). My last lessons in math are now 15 years ago. Although I am working through SICP with a math book at my side the explanations given in SICP are really sufficient to understand the stuff. I really appreciate SICP, it is demanding, but great fun. I also would recommend to buy it as a book, I prefer that from reading on screen.
Sometimes you have to cope with some difficulties because language standards have changed (eg. Running SICP Pattern Matching Rule Based Substitution Code) or the authors assume existing functions which are just defined later in the book (eg. How do I get the functions put and get in SICP, Scheme, Exercise 2.78 and on). As a you always will find solutions or hints on the web this is nothing which should bother you.
If you know any amount of programming you'll likely be better off for it, but it's by no means a requirement when going through the SICP. I'm going through it right now (cover to cover style), and I'm up too section 2.3.3. The biggest road block for me has been how maths based some of the problems can be, as it's been a while since I did maths back in high school. For these problems I've resorted to googling an explanation of the problem and solution. Like programming, maths isn't a requirement either, obviously because I'm still making progress through the book, but I feel it could help at times.
The only requirement you'll honestly need, is a computer and a scheme implementation, I'd recommend MIT scheme or DrRacket.
TL;DR
The only requirement you'll need is a computer, and a scheme implementation, everything else can be learned as you go along.
I'm writing to ask for some guidance on choosing a language and course of action in learning programming. I apologize if this type of question is inappropriate for Cross Validated, please advise me to another forum if that is the case.
I've seen thread after thread with questions from newbies, asking, "What is the best language to start with?" and then it always starts a flame war or someone just answers, "There's no best language, it's best to pick one and start learning it." My question is a little bit more focused than that.
First off, I've been programming my whole life, in very limited capacities. My deepest training was in C++. Whilst in my EECS degree program, I resolved to never be a software developer because I couldn't stand not interacting with people for such long periods of time. Instead I realized I wanted to be a math teacher, and so that is the path I have taken.
But now that I'm well down that path, I've started to realize that perhaps I could develop my own software to help me in the classroom. If I want to demonstrate the Euclidean algorithm, what better way than to have a piece of software that breaks down the process? Students could run that software as part of their studies, and the advanced students might even develop programs for themselves. Or, with an Ipad in hand, why not have an app that lets students take their own attendance? It would certainly streamline some of the needs of classroom management.
There's obviously a lot of great stuff already out there for math, and for education, but I want a way to more directly create things specific to my lectures. If I'm teaching a specific way of calculating a percent, I want to create an app that aligns with my teaching style, not just another calculator app that requires the student to learn twice.
The most I use in class right now is iWork Numbers/Microsoft Excel for my stats class. Students can learn the basic statistical functions, and turn some of their data into graphs.
I have dabbled a bit with R, and used Maple in college. I've started the basic tutorials for OS X/iOS development and have actually made good progress making an OS X app that takes a text string, converts it to numbers, and performs encryption using modular addition and multiplication. I sometimes use Wolfram|Alpha to save myself some time in getting quick solutions to equations or base conversions. I know of MatLab, Mathematica, and recently people have been telling me to check into Python or Ruby. I also know basic HTML, and while it's forgotten now, learned Javascript and PERL in college.
If I keep on the path of Obj-C/Cocoa, I think it will have great benefits. Unfortunately, anything I produced for Mac would only be usable on a Mac, so it wouldn't be universal for all of my students. Perhaps then learning a web language would be better. Second, I'm wondering if the primary use is mathematical, then perhaps my time would be better spent learning Mathematica Programming Language, or R, or something based less on GUI and more on simple coding of algorithms, maybe Python or Ruby?
It seems that Mathematica already has a lot of demos for different math concepts, so why reinvent the wheel is also a question I have. I think overall, it would be good to have more control and design things the way I need. And then, if I do want to make an "Attendance" app or something else, I would already have the programming experience to more easily design something for my iPad or MacBook.
The related question to this is what is a good language to teach to my students? In his TED talk, Conrad Wolfram says one of the best ways to check the understanding of a student is have them write a program. But if Mathematica does the math virtually automatically for them, then I'm not sure that will get the deeper experience of working out logic for themselves, like you do when you're writing C, or a traditional procedural language.
I know that programming takes time to learn, but I also know that at this point, my goal is not to be able to make an app like "Tiny Wings." With the app store ease, some of my work may be an extra revenue stream, but I see myself as more of a hobbyist, and now teacher looking to software development specifically for its ability to help me demonstrate mathematical concepts.
I think I will push ahead with Obj-C/Cocoa for OSX/iOS, but if anyone has some better guidance regarding all of the other available stuff, it would be much appreciated. I don't think I would want to go fully to the web (I like apps), but perhaps someone could suggest a nice way of bridging what I produce in XCode to a universal web version. For example, if you come up with an algorithm in obj-c is it easiest to transition that to ruby and run it online, or is there another approach that works better?
Mathematica is pretty awesome for the first part of your question. I've used the interactive mode (Manipulate[]) for explaining things to my colleges (and myself). It makes really nice dynamic figures and is fairly expressive (although your code can end up looking like line noise). It is very powerful, but it does far less for you than you might think. It's pretty intuitive, which is a good thing for teaching.
You could use Scala if you want an "easy" way to make a domain specific language for teaching. Python seems to confuse people as a first programming language. Objective C seems like a completely random choice to me.
Mathematica then. It's worth the price. But anything that is interpreted and has an interactive shell is probably better than a compiled language. BBC BASIC?
Nothing beats Haskell for general-purpose mathematical programming. The wiki's quite extensive and the IRC channel (#haskell on Freenode) is great for asking questions. If you statically link your binaries on compilation, you should be able to run your programs on just about any system (with a few exceptions, e.g., libgmp).
Haskell code reads (roughly) like mathematical notation once you get the hang of it, so it can really help to tie things together for your students who are motivated to write their own programs. The purely functional style can be beneficial, as well, since it focuses less on I/O and the marshalling of data (perfectly useful in applications, perhaps less so in pure math), and more on the actual creation and refinement of functions and algorithms. You can even compose functions just as you would on paper.
If you want to get really serious, you could also look into Coq or Agda, but those might be a bit much for most classes.
For a Haskell program idea for an educator, check out this link.
A nice list of arguments can also be found at:
Eleven Reasons to use Haskell as a Mathematician and the book The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming
Could you provide some insight into the techniques that you use to ensure the quality of your solutions. For example, sometimes, I like to test my result using stopifnot() to ensure I'm not receiving ridiculous results. Are there any other techniques or functions that you use in data processing to ensure that you're receiving the solution you meant to?
Note: I realize that this is a broad question and perhaps a candidate for community wiki or even closure, but rather than voting to close, perhaps assist me by adding comments to direct the conversation.
Just a few things that come to mind (in random order)
This page has very interesting link for debugging in R (ok this is during production, but still related to your issue I think)
You can use exceptions, as explained in this discussions (and links therein)
You can write tests with known results (both for success and failure) and see that they actually do what they are supposed to do. Be sure to pass some weird data to the functions and see how they behave in a "not-so-normal" situation.
Don't just rely on automated tests: give your functions to a fairly computer illiterate person at work (not enough that he/she can't use R though!) and let him/her do some beta tests. You'll be amazed at the quantity of errors he/she will come up with!!! :)
Quality in software engineering is quite a massive area, and most of it applies to code written in R as much as code written in Cobol or C#, so my first answer would be 'it depends'.
For me, I come from the Pharmaceutical Industry, where what we do is regulated by government agencies like the FDA and the MHRA. For us, Quality is something we think about throughout the process so I would list the following as visible artifacts of quality;
We have a software development process, that's written down and repeatable (traditionally in this kind of industry this is a waterfall style, but more and more agile / prototyping style methodologies are being used)
We have a system that ensures every person involved knows what they should be doing (job descriptions) and is suitably qualified to do that job (training)
We start by defining what is required in some way, hopefully in some way that can be tested
We have some way of documenting our development process, where we've been and how (a combination of good documentation and Source Control)
We do testing wherever possible, and as early as possible (so, automated if possible)
We have people who are responsible for overseeing Quality, who are separate from people who are doing to prevent conflicts
We control the software environment that is used for development, testing and production (read; change control)
We control and manage software once it is in use, tracking issues and managing them (Issue Tracking)
We keep records, so that even if every person involved went under a bus / won the lottery the new people could still defend and prove everything above to a government inspector.
However, that's a big list, and I imagine their are lots of industries that don't do all of them (finance, education) and probably some who do more (building nuclear reactors, saving lives, NASA).
More specifically to what i assume you're getting at, before you code you should be able to define some specific starting input's and the answers you should get out, and I recommend you use something like RUnit or Testthat to build these in.
I used to play a MUD based on the Smaug Codebase. It was highly customized, but was the same at the core. I have the source code for this MUD, and am interested in writing my own (Just for a fun project). I've got some questions though, mostly about design aspects. Maybe someone can give me a hand?
What language should I use? Interpreted or compiled? Does it make a difference? SMAUG is written in C. I am comfortable with a lot of languages, and have no problem learning more.
Is there a particular approach I should follow to not hinder performance? Object Oriented, functional, etc?
What medium should I use for storing data? Flat files (This is what SMAUG uses), or something like SQLite. What are the performance pros/cons of both?
Are there any guides that anyone knows of on how to get started on a project like this?
I want it to scale to allow 50 players online at a time with no decrease in performance. If I used Ruby 1.8 (very slow), would it make a difference compared to using Python 3.1 (Faster), or compiled C/C++?
If anyone can lend a hand and give some info or advice, I'd be eternally grateful.
I'll give this a shot:
In 2009, for a 50 player game, it doesn't matter. You may want to pick a language that you're familiar with profiling tools for, if you want to grow it further, but since RAM is so cheap nowadays, the constraints driving the early LPMUD (which I have experience with) and DikuMUD (which your Smaug is derived from) don't apply. (LPMUD could handle ~10-15 players on a machine with 8MB RAM)
The programming style doesn't necessarily lead to performance difficulties, large sites like Amazon's 'obidos' webserver are written in C, but just-as-large sites like the original Yahoo Stores were written in Lisp, StackOverflow is written in ASP.NET, etc. I'd /personally/ use C but many people would call me a sadist.
Flat Files are kind of pointless in today's day and age for lots of data storage, there are specific-case exceptions (Large mailservers sometimes use 'maildir' which is structured flat-files, for example). The size of your game likely means you won't be running into huge slowness driven by data retrieval delays, but the data integrity in-case-of-crash are probably going to make the most convincing argument.
Don't know of any guide, but what I'd do is try to get the game started as a dumb chat server to start, make sure users can log in and do something (take their input and dump it to all other users), then build that up to allowing specific logins, so you'll start facing the challenge of username/password handling, and user option setting / storage / retrieval ... then start adding the gamedriver elements (get tic tac toe games working in game), then go a little more complex (get a 5-room setup working with objects you can pick up / drop / bash each other with), then add some non-player characters, and THEN worry about slurping in the Diku-derived smaug castles / etc and working with them. :)
This is a bit off the cuff , I'm sure there are dissenting opinions. :) Good luck!
This is a text based game, right? In that case, with current hardware, it seems all you would have to worry about is not accidentally creating an O(n**2) algorithm. Even that probably wouldn't be too bad with 50 users.
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My 7 year old would like to learn, how to program? (his idea not mine, and he does things in the outside world. So, I am not too worried from that point of view. He already went so far as to take a game programming book out of my office to read at bed time.) The other day we sat down and wrote a very simple number guessing game (you pick 8 and it is correct, anything else it is wrong).
It went OK but there were a number of questions he had based on the syntax of the language. (I happened to pick Java as I had the IDE opened at the time.) I teach post-secondary introductory programming courses so this was a bit of an eye opener to me (most students out of high school are reluctant to ask questions) as I really had to figure out, how to explain syntax to a 7 year old?
Clearly any C type language is going to have the same issues, as will most “languages”. I looked at squeak but decided not to use it yet. I looked at the Alice environment but didn't like it for this either.
From a physical point of view he is comfortable with a keyboard/mouse and can put together Lego sets with relative ease (so following directions with a fun outcome works for him). I have access to Lego NXT but he is still a bit young for that (it takes too long to see the results of the work, even with the supplied graphical environment).
Ideally I'd like the experience to help him build up confidence in math and logic (if a 7 year old has logic:-).
I remember using turtle graphics/logo as a child. I am leaning towards this but wondering if there are any other ideas or if anyone can recommend a good logo environment?
Edit 1:
Logo works out well. I'll need to teach him the concept of angles (90 degrees, 180 degrees). Unfortunalty they don't really do division at school yet so angles might be fun...
First off draw a square:
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
At some point later I'll go into loops:
REPEAT 4
[
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
]
And then variables:
make "length 50
REPEAT 4
[
FORWARD :length
RIGHT 90
]
This works out very well. Virtually no syntax, easy for a 7 year old to remember the vocabulary, and immediate feedback.
Edit 2:
Well it was a success, in that he was able to write a simple program (no loops yet) while I was out of the room. It actually works out very well - we went out and got to graph paper and a protractor, we fugured out 90 degree angles, and he made a bunch of squares, turned a square into a rectangle, and got to see where he went wrong and how to debug it. I'd recommend this approach for anyone with a 7 year old who is interested in programming. I think I'd recommend it to my post-secondary students too (!)
There is actually a browser-based Logo interpreter in Javascript.
http://logo.twentygototen.org/
I strongly disagree with the people who say seven year olds would have a hard time learning new syntax. This is completely backwards. Try teaching pig latin to a seven year old and to a thirty something non-native English speaker. Or try traveling in a foreign country with your kids. See who can chat fluently with the natives after a month (hint: it probably won't be you).
Kids pick up on arbitrary linguistic conventions much faster than us gray hairs do.
I learned how to program when I was 10 in exactly the way you taught your son. My dad used the GW-Basic interpreter that came with our AT&T PC6300, and we wrote a game where the computer asked you a question, and you had to answer A/B/C. The big advantage to syntax in GW-Basic was that you didn't have multi-line statements. You might want to try something similar. Java, with it's curly braces, might be a little tough.
Example code:
10 PRINT "What color is Big Bird?"
20 PRINT "A. Blue"
30 PRINT "B. Green"
40 PRINT "C. Yellow"
50 INPUT$ ANSWER$
60 IF ANSWER$ = "C" THEN PRINT "Good Job!" ELSE PRINT "Oops, wrong answer!"
I spent hours upon hours using various permutations of that syntax and writing my own "games". And it made me want to learn more... might help.
Tell him about parsers. You just need to add context and reasoning to why things exist. The curly braces are so that the machine that reads the code knows where things start and stop.
I find that most people including children pick up things easily as long as you explain the purpose of them. This is why school was a terrible failure for me, no-one ever explaining the point of learning half the stuff.
Scratch is another one. Developed at MIT specifically for the purpose of teaching programming to children.
I think that Python might fit your needs. It is well known for being easier to learn than many other languages and the interactive interpreter allows programmers to immediately see what happens when a piece of code is executed. The IDLE gui that comes with it is easy to use. It also has a turtle module through TKinter.
https://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html
Developmentally, a seven year-old is unlikely to grasp the basics of syntax even in their spoken language.
Whatever language or environment you use, I would recommend focusing on the idea of programming as play rather than the ability to write actual programs. Towards this end, something you can run from a command line and see immediate results, like Python or, for a more graphical experience, Silverlight, would probably be best.
Microsoft has a couple of interesting efforts that seems a nice fit:
popfly: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950523.aspx --- "Popfly includes a simple way to create and share games with your friends. Choose from a variety of built-in templates or start from scratch to create a side scrolling game, a 2D shoot-em-up, or a host of others. And best of all, you can get started without writing a line of code" ... I think it can really help being motivated :)
smallbasic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx --- supposed to be simplified but having intellisense+.net framework support (the short description is too marketing like, so I didn't paste it :P)
Try Small Basic, which has a mini-BASIC language and simplified for the younger crowd.
Flee from Java! Try something designed for teaching, like scratch, LOGO, or PLT Scheme.
Why not go back to the days of QBasic? That's the first language I learned (actually it was GW-BASIC, but that's beside the point).
The syntax is much easier to get one's head around (albeit fickle and sometimes downright frustrating). It doesn't teach anything OO, but that's probably above his head anyway, as it would have been mine.
This site may also be of interest.
I'd say use visual basic, or something similar where you don't have to worry about syntax, curly braces, etc as much. I was programming at 7, but it was in LOGO and C64 Basic. I HATED LOGO ... it was so frustrating to me that one of the "big" things you could do was move around a stupid turtle. However, C64 Basic (to me) was great ... once I had that down (a couple years) I was psyched to learn C and even C64 assembler.
Two thoughts come to mind:
My 3 year old son loves playing World of Goo with me. He can't solve problems yet, but I can see he is soaking up loads of information.
Have a go with Alice. My son is too young to try this, but once he is older we'll give it a go if he is keen. FWIW I learnt about this program after watching The Last Lecuture by Randy Pausch (R.I.P)
Have him check out http://scratch.mit.edu. My seven year old is learning this as we type...
Etoys is perhaps the thing you're looking for. It's a partly graphical flavour of smalltalk made just for children. This is used by the olpc project.
I was involved with a primary-grade computer course using Stagecast. This is a graphical programming language designed for children. I found it an ideal introductory language because it is graphical and interactive. It does not require reading or mathematics, it runs on Windows and Mac OS, and is ideal for simple games so children are motivated to learn.
While it appears that it is being redesigned, you can still get the old version of Hackety Hack, which is a ruby programming kit designed by _why for teenagers and beginning programmers.
I am a bit torn about Alice.
On the one hand, it is nice to have a framework where you can program with direct visual gratification. This is really a good idea.
On the other hand, I think that it is a very bad idea to have beginners program exclusively by drag and drop. I fear that this might even lead to a sort of illiteracy, where they are unable to produce properly written code when the drag and drop interface is taken away.
Personally, I think the basics of arithmetic operations and Boolean logic are more important to teach to a child first. After they have grasped these concepts then I think moving on to the basic constructs are appropriate. I just don't see how a child could understand conditionals and looping without Boolean logic, but then again, there are some pretty bright kids out there :)
Assuming the previous statement is met, I would have to cast my vote for python.
I would have looked for one of the many arcade game engines and let him play with that. Choose one where he will need to use loops and conditions, and maybe some procedures.
There a book called Learning to program from pragmatic that is geared towards people who have never programmed before and might not be extremely technical.
It uses Ruby which can be quite easy for new people to pick up.
Squeak Smalltalk system is an implementation of Smalltalk that I have heard much good about when it comes to educating children in programming.
The Etoys project supposedly contains lots of resources for keeping the learning experience fun and motivating.
I became interested in programming when I was introduced to Turing language in high school. Turing was used as a teaching language in many schools at the time, and it worked very well for me to introduce programming concepts. Here is a description of Turing from WikiPedia
Turing is a Pascal-like programming language developed in 1982 by Ric Holt and James Cordy, then of University of Toronto, Canada. Turing is a descendant of Euclid, Pascal and SP/k that features a clean syntax and precise machine-independent semantics.
Named after British computer scientist Alan Turing, Turing is used primarily as a teaching language at the high school and university level. Two other versions exist, Object-Oriented Turing and Turing Plus, a systems programming variant. In September 2001, "Object Oriented Turing" was renamed "Turing" and the original Turing was renamed "Classic Turing". Turing is available from Holt Software Associates in Toronto.
Versions for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh are available. Turing is still widely used in high schools in Ontario as an introduction to programming.
In November 2007, Turing, which was previously a commercialized programming language, became freeware. As of November 28, 2007, it was available for download from the Holt Software website free of charge for personal, commercial, and educational use.1
You could also use Commodore 64 emulator. It start's right from BASIC.
Might as well throw out Lego™ Mindstorms™ as a possibility. It uses a graphical programming language based on LabView.
I read this post earlier today, and then by chance accidentally went to YUP.com and discovered
Teaching Kids to Hack(Program) with Hackety Hack
Figured I'd post it as an additional resource for anyone looking at this question.
I recently responded to a similar SO question with a pointer to kidbasic, which is open source and cross platform software.
Scheme is nice and syntactically similar to Logo, in the respects of simplicity. Also Scheme offers a very intuitive way of understanding recursion and picking up these type of fundamental concepts in computer science that early on is nothing but good with more good.
UCB Scheme also offers a lot of built in functionality for manipulating sentences, which may make more sense to a 7 year old than constructing polygons and solving number puzzles (not to say that the sky's the limit!).
I was typing programs from the book "BASIC Fun" when I was in 2nd grade.
I distinctly remember that the concepts of infinite loops and INPUT A$ was like discovering gravity. Heady stuff.
Self taught, my progress was glacially slow, although I did reach a point in a program where I wished that GOSUB took variable arguments, which in retrospect meant I understood function pointers.
My early goals included writing LONG programs. A lengthy program not a bad goal for a 7 year old because a program with a well defined spec makes the risk of failure too high. Anyone can write a long program and feel good about it and learn a lot along the way.
There was a whole genre of books for programming in BASIC for kinds from the 80s. That stuff is a great source of programming ideas. However I wouldn't recommend using BASIC even for a 7 year old-- lua has the simple feel of BASIC but it isn't broken crap.
Look no further, there's actually an entire learning platform/ OS designed for this very purpose: Sugar.
The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) operating system called Sugar is now available to the general public and you can run it as a VM within all major operating systems such as Mac, Windows and Linux.
Download a copy at Sugar Labs.
One interesting activity included is called TurtleArt, a souped up 21st century version of Logo. Also has a kid friendly version of a Python IDE called Pippy. It actually teaches kids Python!
See TurtleArt and Pippy and the other activities found in Sugar.
Alan Kay was behind some of the novel concepts in Sugar OS which is actually a modern incarnation of his visionary DynaBook. Even as an adult (who's an engineer), I find it fun to play with.
And if you love Sugar as a VM, you can even buy the hardware and at the same time help a poor kid somewhere else in the world.
Engadget explains : OLPC XO Buy-One, Give-One program underway
As a bonus to us adults, Sugar is derived from Fedora. So it's a real and complete Linux based OS. Should be fun to hack. ;-)