039 RR Programming Language Fundamentals

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:44 — 86.2MB)

Panel

• Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Summer Camp)
• David Brady (blog witter github ADDcasts)
• James Edward Gray (blog twitter github)
• Josh Susser (twitter github blog)

Discussion

• “The fundamentals are hidden by the incidentals”
• C/Lisp to learn programming
• Scheme
• SmallTalk
• Dynabook
• BASIC
• Haskell
• JavaScript
• AppleScript
• Erlang
• Ruby
• BASH
• Actor Models
• Any language can be a good language depending on the concepts you’re conveying
• You can’t teach experience
• Object Oriented Programming
• Functional Programming
• Don’t teach the edge cases first
• “Why would you start with an Object Oriented language and not teach Objects in the first lesson?”
• Object = Identity + State + Behavior
• [Ruby]‘s as easy to teach as Visual Basic
• The first language people learn is Excel
• Avoid ceremony
• Static Analysis
• Synthetic Programming on a TI-85
• Logo (Turtle)
• Pascal
• 8085 bytecodes
• opcodes
• Assembly Language
• Ruby Garbage Collector
• Memory Management
• C
• malloc/free
• Forth
• RPN language

Picks

• RubyMine (Josh)
• PuzzleNode (James)
• Zoe Keating (James)
• Radio Lab episode on Zoe Keating (James)
• in C remixed (James)
• Star Wars uncut  (David)
• Apple Magic Mouse (Chuck)
• Dora The Explorer (Chuck)