As everyone interacts with their families over the holidays many of you might have younger folks who are interested in learning about programming. So I thought I'd share something I found that is really good for helping beginners of all ages, and without the kind of "toy" feel of languages like Scratch which I've heard anecdotally turns off even kids.
Earlier this year I started a class teaching architects comuptational design. The goal was to get them using Grasshopper [1]. However - although gh is a real programming language, it isn't good for introducing the fundamental concepts of programming logic. (It doesn't natively expose loops and there's a big learning curve to setting up conditionals, etc.)
So I wanted to teach fundamental concepts using flow charts and went looking for a program better than Visio for this. Of course I started with Drakon[2]. It's fine but I found that it was a little too easy to do things that weren't constrained enough, which you need with early learners. Amazingly I found one better - the program Flowgorithm[3], which allows you to program using flow charts directly. And it has a neat feature that will convert the logic into textual code of 18+ programming languages.
While of course it's hard for the programs to be much beyond trivial, it turned out to be an EXCELLENT way to connect developing a procedural mindset to actual text code.
Since it's been a long time since it was on HN [a][b], and timely to everyone's breaks I wanted to share it here again. Enjoy, and good luck to the future hacker in your life!
I once worked at an architecture firm where one of the principles was problematic and my coworker who worked with him directly was constantly cleaning up his messes, etc. (Don't worry, the guy was just a tool, this wasn't an HR matter.)
I have always been a "hacker" at heart. Although I couldn't express my thoughts on the guy publicly, I DID add a new linetype to the file which sets them in Autocad which had a rude message about him. The scale was so small It looked like a solid line, but if you were in the file and zoomed in you could see it repeated over and over.
Thinking back, I don't know if any files with that linetype went out to consultants, but if they did the consultants either didn't catch it or kept my secret.
Very cool. If you like this check out the Grasshopper visual programming environment inside Rhino3d. It's also a node-based graph editor and has an extremely robust library developer community [0]. One of which I actually am.
I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...
"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.
The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."
Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.
I had HGttG first read to me when I was 10. I'm 40 now. When I first saw the cheater story yesterday, I had the most awaited "ooohhh" reaction of my life.
Originally, I figured that conkers were some sort of candy bar.
For me, the whole notion of there being a professional conkers league, and its longtime judge, real old chap, using a steel replica to cheat, reads like something Douglas Adams could invent.
He didn't, but the mere fact that conkers are serious enough business that championships among adults even exist, that there are people for whom the game means so much that they engage in it for life, that one of the more prominent of the bunch even makes a conker of steel, and then an accusation of using it to cheat is raised — there should be a movie or a story about this. This is a quality urban legend material. Today it may be a nothingburger, but as years go by, it inevitably gets smoothed and a bit embellished here and there — just a little bit, you understand — and then the next Douglas Adams puts it in a setting where it is super hilarious and unmistakably British.
I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.
I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written
So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.
But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?
To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.
It's a childhood story dressed up in sci-fi. If an American child had told it, they might have said they demanded baseball cards, and the amused captain would have given them food, booze and "lots of baseball cards, of course". Children all over the world occasionally make demands of adults and are thrilled when the adults oblige them; their bold dare paid off! Children make up games at school, so when all the chestnuts fall off the trees, children make a game from the mass availability of chestnuts.
It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.
It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]
Re your last note (which is hilarious) I was hugely amused to discover that many Americans reading in Potter about Filch "punting" the kids across the temporary swamp assumed he was kicking them over rather than using a flat bottomed boat. Understandable but much funnier than the original intended.
Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote.
It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams. He was incredibly logical. That was his genius: He would extrapolate on every topic to their logical conclusions - from computers to science to religion.
When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal. He doesn't just drop in complete nonsense.
So the question remains: What part of British culture or Adams personal history am I missing where it's logical for an adult to happen to have a bunch of chestnuts on hand to give to children?
> "Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams."
In my opinion (as a Brit who isn't an expert on Douglas Adams, but has read his books) the person you replied to was completely right and it's you with the misunderstanding.
Absurdist humour, Hitchhiker's is full of it, as is Discworld. Aggressive Britishisms as well (like conkers and tea references), like in the Cornetto trilogy.
> But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"?
If you want a good in-universe explanation, here’s one: in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod’s grandfather says that he was friends with Yooden Vranx. He would anticipate the kids would drop by.
It would, but depending on the dictionary there might not be much, if any, context about the game.
You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).
“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.
This was actually before I started elementary school. Once I did start school I recall looking it up and not finding anything in the dictionaries to which I had access in a midwestern small town - school, local public library etc. I assume if I had checked the big pedestal dictionary in the public library I would have found it. But being very young I didn't think to. When I reread it a few years later (still very young) I just got the context that it was a kids game and moved on. I wasn't ever so desperate to know that I went avidly looking for an answer. But when my aunt went to London I did think to ask so I got an answer.
I was curious, and looked in my paperback Merriam Webster american english dictionary that I used through out school and received about the time I first read HHGTTG. Conker is not present.
The big honking dictionary on a pedestal at the high school library probably would have had it, and if that was not enlightening then the library in the closest city that we visited monthly would have good encyclopedias that probably would have described it. But I don't remember the conkers reference catching my imagination, and probably wrote it off as a silly made-up sci-fi word.
You'd need an encyclopedia to have any real chance of understanding what kind of game it is, a dictionary typically only gives very small amounts of context.
For me one of the most important things here is the clarity of the problem -maker- at the top. That's the difference between the "Iversonian" symbolic languages (J and K included) and others. It doesn't have the elegance and power of a one line solution, but it's just so clean and comprehensible even without the disciplined commenting. (Although I really think lamp is not a good comment glyph. Sorry about the sacred cow I just took a swipe at fellow array nerds.)
One line solutions are incredible, and tacit is mind-bendingly cool. To use the unique compactness of a glyph-based language as a way to efficiently describe and perform functional programming - then to do that all over arrays!? - whoever had these ideas [0] is utterly genius.
But as someone trying to make time to write a program ground up in APL, knowing that I won't be able to make it just a set of really good one liners, that example is also significant for me.
Just because you can write everything on one line without any spaces doesn't mean you should.
You can ofcourse removethe capability to do thatand you'll effectively force the programmer to write more venous code, but then its strength as an interfacing tool is very much reduced.
The Iversonian languages has the capability to write incredibly terse code which is really useful when working interactively. When you do, your code truly is write-only because it isn't even saved. This is the majority of code that at least I write in these languages.
When writing code that goes in a file, you can choose which style you want to use, and I certainly recommend making it a bit less terse in those cases. The Iversonian languages are still going to give you organs that are much shorter than most other languages even even it's written in a verbose style.
The 'computed COME FROM' is even more interesting than the regular one due to it's ability to violate causality by coming from a place in the code before it was ever computed.
That of course makes migrating from Intercal difficult for a lot of organizations.
I've had much success integrating Brainfuck in a legacy C++ codebase. As the team adopts modern idiomatic C++ patterns and practices, we found Brainfuck via https://github.com/tfc/cpp_template_meta_brainfuck_interpret... to be a natural and seamless fit for C++ template metaprogramming.
Buyer beware – as a a legacy mainframe user of INTERCAL (IBM VM/370), steer cleer of mainframe migration services that promise migration from INTERCAL to BF on commodity cloud on a fixed time scale – they use AI tools but don't do robust testing. Much better to stay on IBM but write new modules in enterprise z/INTERCAL, even if it's not the best developer environment.
Earlier this year I started a class teaching architects comuptational design. The goal was to get them using Grasshopper [1]. However - although gh is a real programming language, it isn't good for introducing the fundamental concepts of programming logic. (It doesn't natively expose loops and there's a big learning curve to setting up conditionals, etc.)
So I wanted to teach fundamental concepts using flow charts and went looking for a program better than Visio for this. Of course I started with Drakon[2]. It's fine but I found that it was a little too easy to do things that weren't constrained enough, which you need with early learners. Amazingly I found one better - the program Flowgorithm[3], which allows you to program using flow charts directly. And it has a neat feature that will convert the logic into textual code of 18+ programming languages.
While of course it's hard for the programs to be much beyond trivial, it turned out to be an EXCELLENT way to connect developing a procedural mindset to actual text code.
Since it's been a long time since it was on HN [a][b], and timely to everyone's breaks I wanted to share it here again. Enjoy, and good luck to the future hacker in your life!
[1] https://www.grasshopper3d.com/
[2] https://drakonhub.com/
[3] http://www.flowgorithm.org/index.html
[a]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834315
[b]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138283
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