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!
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!
[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