Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2014)

Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by opnitro on Monday November 02, 2015 @09:37PM (#10497043)

I've always had people who wanted to learn programming become so bogged down in the tools around programming. It led me to thinking that it might be better to teach the fundamentals with pen/paper/whiteboard. To get the "this is why programming is important/powerful" message across. Anyone tried this/had any success with it?

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by Gibbon1 on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:20PM (#10497230)

I have a small anecdote about this.

In the last couple of years I've had few people ask me 'how can I write a program with a GUI.' And I give the advice, 'Download the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio for C# and select new project, windows forms' and then start mucking around.

All of them were convinced by others to use qt and C++ All of them gave up after a week or two of no progress.

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by kibibu on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:55PM (#10497391)

I got my start at "serious programming" using Visual Basic 6. There is a lot to be said for early successes.

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by mamcx on Tuesday November 03, 2015 @08:25AM (#10499338)

I start with FoxPro DOS (2.6). After the end of the 3 months course, a full app with menus, forms, reports, etc. The same with Acces. Later Delphi (the best RAD ever!). In contrast, Visual Studio is clumsy.. but all others tools fall so far below than people truly imagine html+js is easy!

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by Terr_ on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:06PM (#10497171)

I haven't pushed it on any family-members yet, but "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" does a pretty good job building up from the basics, although my eyes started to glaze over a bit when it came to some of the circuit-diagrams.

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by NH_2 on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:20PM (#10497232)

Sort of. I taught middle-school students programming using Scratch (and a whiteboard) for three summers, and found that its interface of dragging and dropping blocks of code worked well for teaching programming fundamentals (conditionals, loops, functions, events, etc) without the hassle of a command-line.

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by Daneel_ on Monday November 02, 2015 @09:50PM (#10497095)

I've done this in a non-professional environment to allow my partner to understand what I do.

We used a whiteboard to draw a flowchart of the logical steps needed to make Tetris work, then wrote pseudocode for those modules.

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Re:Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery (2... by vox_mollis on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:23PM (#10497245)

I've always had people who wanted to learn programming become so bogged down in the tools around programming

Bogged down in an editor and a compiler?

When first starting out, there are two tools.

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