Funk Babblings

It's been a while since I've done a real update, and now I have a collection of geeky stuff to share....


A couple weekends ago I went to the fifth Ohio LinuxFest. ( Read more... )

One of the booths at OLF was promoting Penguicon, a "Science Fiction and Open Source Software Convention" held every April in a suburb of Detroit. I've thought about going before, but next year Randall Munroe of XKCD fame will be there, so we might have to go.

By the way, I wore my XKCD regular expressions t-shirt to OLF, and got many approving comments. Then I wore it to a bellydance dinner performance that night and discovered one other person in the room who claimed to know regular expressions. (He said his name was Ken, but I neglected to ask him if his last name was Thompson.)

Today coding_horror talks about geek exercise, including gadgets for exercising while programming or gaming.

Also today, ah_graylensman points out that people are working on LOLCODE, a programming language in which you say things like "HAI" and "KTHXBYE" instead of "begin" and "end".

Finally, after growing up watching my dad build things with them all the time, I now have my own (power, compound) miter saw. And for geek points, apparently they all have laser targeting guides these days.

Now if only the motion-sensitive light switch we bought for the kitchen worked properly with the fluorescent lights in there.....

Salon is running a story wherein author David Brin complains that the computer world's deprecation and collective purging of the BASIC programming language (which of course he grew up with) is somehow hurtful to the technological development of today's kids, including his own. He seems to think that BASIC is a low-level programming language that helps kids understand how the machine works. Of course, the only way BASIC is low-level is that it encourages use of goto, like machine language and unlike modern high-level languages. Otherwise it is designed to insulate the programmer from the machine.

It seems to me that Brin is stuck thinking that the way he learned things is the only way to learn them, and he doesn't seem interested in modern options. I grew up on BASIC too, but I got away from it as soon as practical, and I wouldn't recommend that as a way for anyone to learn programming today.

If Brin wants his kid to learn something close to the machine (his major professed goal), he should choose C. If he wants his kid to learn a language that lets him ignore the machine and do higher-level algorithm work (part of the original goal of BASIC), he should choose Python or Ruby. Responses at Salon also mentioned programming TI-82 calculators, Lego Mindstorms, and other options that modern kids have and were unavailable to past generations.

On top of all that, today's technically-interested kids can put Linux or BSD on their computers and not only choose from a wide selection of programming languages to use (rather than the BASIC interpreter built into the computer and whatever else their parents could afford, as the previous generation did), but also delve as deep as they want into how all the pieces of the software and operating system work.

In one sense, however, Brin has a point. He mentions that his son's math textbook includes BASIC programs to demonstrate the algorithms. Since the computer world has rejected BASIC (a message the textbook writers seem to have missed), there is no single universally-accepted replacement. But that's mostly because of Microsoft - unlike every other common operating system today, Windows doesn't come with any development tools since they deprecated QBasic starting with Windows 95. On the other hand, MacOS, Linux, and BSD usually have Perl, Python, and others either built in or readily available for download.

Perl may be the closest we have today to a universally-available programming language -- it's an easy download and install on Windows, is generally built-in everywhere else, and is quite mature and popular. Many complain about its syntax, though most of that weirdness is obsolete and easily avoided. Python would be second (and a better first language), but it too has its quirks (well, one major quirk plus an object-orientation annoyance). Maybe Ruby is the way to go these days.