It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family.
Then Aunt Jody calls.
“Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.”
You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2.
“I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?”
But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.
Re:Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
by skeaker on Thursday March 30, 2023 @05:40PM
(#35379153)
Great read, thanks for sharing. This took me down an hour long rabbit hole of airplane safety procedures which is not what you would have expected going in.
Oh... that path takes you to strange places.
Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors - https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177... (7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11231631 )
It starts when we’re 8 and coding our very first program. “What’s your favorite color?” it asks, sweetly, twirling a lock of Visual Basic around its finger. You type in your answer, the screen changes color accordingly, and boom — time to show off to family.
Then Aunt Jody calls.
“Honey, it froze on me. ‘Color.exe has crashed.’ I don’t know what that means.” You take a look at her entry. She entered: 2.
“I thought it asked how many favorite colors I had?”
But how could you…but what does it even mean to have more than one favori…ok, fine. No big deal. You add a sliver of code to stop people from typing numbers into the box.