A few months ago I stumbled across an interesting open source project created by Katrina Owen called exercism.io that provides a collection of programming practice problems in over 30 languages. On the surface, it’s a great resource for learning to code or learning a new language. I’ve found however that as you dig deeper it has much more to offer on a number of levels.
To get started you simply install the exercism command line client, login with GitHub, pick a language to work in, and fetch your first problem. The first problem in many languages is often just a simple “hello world” exercise just to get you started. When you fetch a problem you get a ReadMe file with a description of the challenge and a suite of unit tests. In TDD style you write code until the tests are passing and you’ve solved the problem. Afterwards, you submit your solution and other exercism users are able to review and comment on your code. You can carry on the conversation and submit additional revisions of your code as part of this informal peer code review.
When we think of the term radio, “high-tech” isn’t the first word that comes to mind anymore. A lot of people will think of analog commercial radio (“FM/AM“), something that started up around the 1920s. In fact, many airports, public safety organizations, and businesses still use conventional analog radio to communicate. However, digital radio completely dominates cellular communication and is increasing in usage with public safety organizations.
Given how low-level analog radio electronics are, how do software engineers and computers fit into the picture? Software-defined radio (SDR) is a way of performing radio communications using software components in place of hardware components (e.g., mixers, modulators, filters, etc.).
I’m just realizing that this here blog just celebrated its first birthday — my first ‘hello world‘ post here was May 1, 2012. This seems like a good opportunity to go looking through the archives and point to some older posts that newer visitors/subscribers may not have read.
Ryan Brubaker did a great threepartseries on using CoffeeScript and Backbone.js:
CoffeeScript has been all the rage lately and I’ve been wanting to hop on board the bandwagon. I’ve also seen Backbone.js mentioned quite a bit and was even more intrigued after listening to this .NET Rocks podcast. I decided to convert some plain JavaScript code I had in a side project to use both CoffeeScript and Backbone.js and see how things went.
The project is a simplified morse code simulator that animates morse code being sent over a telegraph line. The complete source is available here and the running code can be seen here.
I was interested to learn this week that the folks at github recently updated their JavaScript style guide to require that all new JavaScript code be written using CoffeeScript. That’s a pretty significant vote of confidence in my eyes — if you’ve been assuming that CoffeeScript is just a fad, maybe this will prompt you to re-evaluate that stance.
Steve Huey dropped a whole bunch of useful iOS/OS X-related posts:
Along the way, I contributed a few pieces talking about the idea of programming as a liberal art, and as something that most people should learn how to do at some level:
I believe that everyone should learn to write a little code, and play an instrument, and make things out of wood, and tend a garden, and cook, and, yes, do a little plumbing, too. They shouldn’t learn these things because they’ll use them every day to earn a paycheck, they should learn them because it makes them better thinkers, and better able to take care of themselves. On top of that — if vast empires were being built on top of plumbing the way that they’re being built on software, I’d say that anyone who was happy to ignore it as a black art practiced by wizards was making a big mistake. The value of acquiring a new mode of thinking isn’t affected by the fact that most people won’t need to use pointers or recursion on a daily basis.
Yesterday, I got pointed to this recent video of a TEDx talk by Mitch Resnick, who runs the Lifelong Kindergarten program at the MIT Media Lab, where he’s built a number of environments used to teach young children about programming:
A couple of points on this —
I’ve written here severaltimesbefore on the value of teaching programming as a liberal art. Much of my thinking on this topic has come from a book that Resnick wrote for the MIT Press in the 90s. “Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams” talks about two things:
Using massively parallel application of small, simple programs to demonstrate self-organizing and otherwise complex systems.
The StarLogo language that he developed to teach grade school children how to apply these concepts. The original version of this software was hosted on the Media Lab’s Connection Machine, but it was later ported to the Mac. (When I first read the book, I remember being jealous that little kids had access to a machine like that. You can probably buy a used one cheaply now, and the story of the company that made them is an interesting read.)
In the first few years of her career, my wife taught the original (non-parallel) version of the Logo language in her 3rd grade classroom, and I had gone in to her classroom a few times to help out. At the time, her efforts were frustrated by the lack of training she actually had been given (no one had ever shown her how to define functions, for example), the amount of time in a week that could be devoted to it, and the fact that her entire class had to share a single Apple ][. The textual nature of the language also made things more difficult for her students (I’ve been coding for a living for over 20 years and I still waste time because of typos; imagine an 8 year old doing hunt-and-peck with two fingers).
In the video above, Resnick shows examples created with the Scratch software that his group has developed at MIT, and that has come into fairly widespread use in schools. It gets around the problem of “coding means typing stuff into an editor” and presents useful constraints to make success more likely. Both of my kids spent time playing with Scratch when they were younger, and the fact that it felt like ‘playing’ instead of learning something boring kept them at it longer than they would have otherwise.
As Resnick points out in the video, even if only a small percentage of the kids who learn programming ever become professional developers, the skills that they’ll acquire are directly applicable skills in normal adult life. Even of they don’t become professional developers, they may end up needing to write code anyway as part of a job (go hang out on Stack Overflow sometime and see all of the biologists who are needing to learn how to program to analyze gene sequences. There’s a major push in the world of library sciences to get librariansprogramming.)
It was never a good idea for programmers to be some sort of elite priesthood, but I understand why things started out that way. I’ve read somewhere (probably an Alan Kay quote that I’m too lazy to track down at the moment) that you’re not fully literate in a medium unless you can both consume and produce in that medium. By presenting a tool with a low barrier to entry and high rate of success, Scratch and its progeny can open the doors to fuller computer literacy starting at a very young age.
