What Language for a kid

[Matt Minuti]

I second everything Bill said :)

Not that you can't start there.  I only have graphical programming with
> LavView, but I suspect that the skills don't translate as easily as you
> hope.
> [If you're a EE or maybe chemist or physicist with no programming skills -
> if you can find such anymore - LabView can be a good alternative.]


In my BSEE, we used MATLAB all the time - probably half my classes were
MATLAB-heavy. And having worked in a university physics research group for
a few years, I got the distinct impression that physicists are almost more
solidly CS than many CS grads. I hear chemists use R a lot, but that's
probably third-hand rumours :)
But LabView is an animal all its own. It's unlike any other graphical
programming language (except probably Mathworks Simulink), and as much as I
love to pick on it, it can be pretty useful for doing things from a
non-sequential, data-flow-centric angle. I once heard an engineering
manager for a medical device firm describe it as "Great for mechanical
engineers to proof-of-concept something software, but awful because now you
have to explain to the customer that while he made the demo in 4 hours,
it'll take your team 3 weeks to make something the FDA won't laugh at, and
another month to make sure it doesn't kill the first person it's hooked up
to."

But LabView shouldn't be an option anyways - there's no Linux version :-D



On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 10:39 PM, Paul Beaudet <inof8or at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> It took me way less than 30 hours to figure out what a semicolon was
> for... Now, maybe it took me a lot longer to stop forgetting them (or
> putting them in the wrong places...), but before that time I was already
> hooked and it was just another part of solving the problem :)
>
> Gee wiz, with python you just have to figure out how 4 spaces are superior
> to tabs and you're all set, no semicolons needed.
>

Possible useful tip to share:

I've had enormous luck explaining semicolons in code by analogizing them to
periods in English. "It's just a way to show the end of a complete
statement. Why not periods? Well, just think about how often you write
numbers with decimal points, and how often you write semicolons. It just
makes it really, really easy for the computer to not get confused about the
end of your sentence."

Agreed on Python, but trying to grok the difference between whitespace
characters (let alone nonprinting characters) when you don't really
understand characters is a little frustrating. In my experience teaching
5th graders through high schoolers, getting semicolons seems to take 2-5
minutes, then it's solid. Getting whitespace characters takes anywhere from
5-10 minutes, to weeks. Minimizing time in the weeds is useful for
everyone, but especially beginners. I think that's part of the reason that
Arduino is so popular - open-source embedded build environments can be a
pain to set up (or at least a timesink).
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