NotAwfulTech

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We should rethink how we teach people to code (deadsimpletech.com)

submitted 6 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

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Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

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[–] lproven@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don’t care about websites.

Agree, in spades.

Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal?

Disagree, although I am not immune.

Graphics. That, for me, is key. Drawing pretty pictures (procedural stuff, like Logo; fonts; and teenage me's particular crack, fractals) was where it was at.

Fuck C and everything it spawned. Give me a Pascal-family thing that doesn't have so much fucking syntactically significant punctuation marks FFS. WORDS, mthrfckr, words not code-breaking types of bloody parentheses.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

C is a terrible programming language and I think we must be clear and open about it when teaching it. But it is perfect for what it is: a showcase of how terrible all those low-level details are, how pointers work and why you don't want to rawdog them, etc.