

Richard Buckland's UNSW Computing 1 - learn with games, puzzles and friends - abrimo
https://www.openlearning.com/courses/unsw/computing1

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stevenykwong
Nice, Richard is the best lecturer in CSE. I miss my COMP1 days

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OrangeCoconut
Agreed, I'm sure this course will be as great as his lectures were/are. Stoked
to see his name randomly pop up on HN.

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codedvillain
This is really exciting. OpenLearning looks like it's really going to give the
other learning websites a run for their money too.

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mran
can't wait to take the course!

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ddd1600
Programming in C! How encouraging for the beginner! Why not ruby?

Look, astrophysics has a word for spots on the sun. Sunspots. Meanwhile the
most fundamental molecule of life is deoxyribonucleic acid. That last word is
a product of the classic education system which encouraged "gentlemen" (today:
"engineers") to study Latin and Greek.

Now I'm not discouraging the teaching and book-printing of rudimentary
languages like C and Latin, but maybe C (and Latin) aren't meant to be learned
today by beginners in a conversational manner. Students who are curious will
naturally look back to ancestor-languages (I have books on C and Perl now as a
ruby programmer). For Latin and Greek we have sites like etymonline.com, which
are great.

What is it with you guys? Are you worried that once the newbies go ruby
they'll never go back? Back where? We all need to evolve as developers. Haha
soapbox I apologize. I like C syntax.

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codedvillain
I think much of this course is also about "under the hood" - what's going on
at a memory level, and fun things to do with microprocessors to get an
understanding of the whole shebang. I think if you can be taught to get good
grasp of the execution stack, heap memory and pointers, then teaching yourself
ruby, python, or any other more abstract language would be a breeze.

