27 replies to this topic

[HDeffo]

MKlegoman357, on 06 March 2015 - 06:12 PM, said:

Well, I think it is a good practice to first define your variables and then use them, at least their definition, not value in any language. Improves readability

honestly I believe it depends on how you organize them. Instead of making them listed in order of reference I prefer to list functions in a logical order. Such as in my tic tac toe program I wanted plmove to be the top one being as it defines the user input side of the game and i figured that would usually be what a user would be reading. After that i wanted place and getball since I felt both of those are obviously important to the code and mostly go hand in hand so should be top and together. And towards the end of the routines I would've listed routines that were more for shortcuts and laziness such as jntswap which really for the most part could be ignored in the code after reading it once.

[MKlegoman357]

In a lot of languages its usually just your preference where you put your variable declarations . IMO by putting them all before using them anywhere is better for someone else who is reading your code. So whenever he/she encounters a function or variable in-use they would already know what it is, instead of discovering it later in the code.

Anyway, I don't have a language that I don't like. Really, every programming language, despite how bad it may be, is good to me, well, because it's a programming language and it is the way it was made. Every thing I might find badly designed or similar I take as a challenge. Well, my most "challenging" programming language I've used was probably "Pascal", but after cracking it's logic I can see how it may exist.

[Justy]

The most difficult language, by far HAS to be WhiteSpace. Its unreadable unless you highlight the different spaces and tabs in different colors, and even then its a pain.

[Lignum]

justync7, on 06 March 2015 - 11:26 PM, said:

The most difficult language, by far HAS to be WhiteSpace. Its unreadable unless you highlight the different spaces and tabs in different colors, and even then its a pain.

Difficulty wise Malbolge, as already mentioned, definitely wins. From Wikipedia: "Malbolge was so difficult to understand when it arrived that it took two years for the first Malbolge program to appear. That program was not written by a human being: it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp."

[Buho]

I think I learned how to program with Karel in my high school! It would have been around 1995. After completing a semester learning GW-BASIC and Q-BASIC, we could take the advanced class with PASCAL. The curriculum used a pseudo environment with a robot, named Karel, not unlike ComputerCraft (which was one of my initial draws to CC).

I remember being frustrated by this at the time, sensing I wasn't in a "real" programming world but instead in a sandbox where I could only control a robot. Nevertheless, it was instructive. Googling around, I found an explanation for why Karel is used: http://math.otterbei...relOverview.htm Click "Home" for screenshots and more information.

No, Karel is not an esoteric language. It is just constructed to emphasize certain things the teacher wants students to learn, I think. For me, the lessons worked and I fell in love with programming.

This class was pivotal and I decided to go to college and get a Computer Science degree. Midway through college I switched to Information Systems (CS had too much theory, not enough application), I got a BS in that, and I've been a professional programmer now for 14 years. I still love going into work every single day!

I love my job, and how I explain why I like what I do to non-programmers hails back to Karel: computers are like robots, and I like making robots do repetitive stuff to make my life easier.

[HDeffo]

Buho, on 09 March 2015 - 05:13 PM, said:

-snip-

Yes I know this karel and this was half of my frustrations getting good documentation because this ISN'T the karel I'm using but there's no way to search between the two because of keyword similarities.

For my class I am using FANUC KAREL. FANUC is a company that makes actual robots in this case it's an arm with a plunger effectively on the end of it. All FANUC robots use a language developed by FANUC and based off of pascal called KAREL.

KAREL the robot is a sort of "teaching" sandbox language. This is also based around controlling a robot however instead of a physical robot it's a sandbox one. KAREL the robot is also like FANUC KAREL written based off of pascal and very similar to it. Both language also appeared roughly around the same time.

So of keywords I tried karel, pascal, robot, etc the only thing that gave me a few results for what I needed was just flat out searching FANUC and navigating from there. Why two languages both based off the same language, having the same name, and having similar keywords, came out at the same rough time period with no one deciding "hey we should change the language name" I really don't much understand.

[Buho]

This is probably because there was no Internet back then

Good luck!

[_removed]

Java. It is so annoying and is very difficult to program in. If somebody paid me £9999999999999999999999999 to program in java, i wouldnt accept it. If i was paid to program in PHP, I instantly would snatch the offer before anybody could touch my money with ther greasy hsnds.