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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former[...] I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method.

I realized as an adult that I do not retain knowledge if I am given that knowledge before I have any way to apply it. I suspect I'm not alone in this; but regardless, I strongly prefer the teaching methodology where you are made acquainted with tools by being given problems which necessitate using those tools. By "tools", here, I refer to algorithms and data structures, among other things. (I think this is why, even though I loved my Algorithms and Data Structures courses, I hated Operating Systems and whatever one it was that taught us assembly language. I retained very little of those and do not count them among the good or useful courses I took.)

I'm aware that this "knowledge-first-to-use-it-later" approach is similar to how the hard sciences are taught; I hated it there as well.

My actual start in programming came from hacking around in the Civilization 4 Python codebase, where I built mods for Fall From Heaven 2 and by necessity had to learn programming syntax-- I was only formally educated in programming later. Contrary to what your argument above would predict I was by far the strongest coder in my graduating class, and went on to get a job in FAANG (where I was, in my judgement, roughly at the top 20% of programmer strength in the company.)

So I don't know the total of what my "ideal programmer education" consists of, but I'm pretty sure a big chunk of it would involve writing a self-designed mod for the game Slay The Spire.

Okay okay, hear me out, this has a number of advantages:

  1. Slay the Spire is entirely programming-first. There is no "editor" interface, as a Unity game would have.

  2. Slay the Spire modding has, as its first step, decompiling the codebase. This gets your student exposure to "the act of having to understand somebody else's extremely nontrivial code".

  3. The codebase is also written using fairly reasonable best practices, particularly for a gaming studio-- it uses polymorphism to deal with all the myriad cards and their effects, which allows you to see very intuitively how polymorphism is used in the wild and why it's valuable. (I know that in my own programming education all of our programs were trivial enough that interfaces and abstract classes seemed weird and pointless, and none of my instructors could give what felt like adequate explanations for their use.)

  4. You can get something pretty cool out the other side-- a game mod! Having something cool and nontrivial that you're in the process of building is worth any number of credit points in inspiring motivation to actually learn programming.

  5. It's Java, which is a very standard programming language which features automated memory management.

So I think if I were designing a programming practicum it would feature game-modding as a big part of it, with perhaps some Code Combat or similar coding game in the first couple of weeks to familiarize students with the basic syntax and philosophy around programming in some reasonably entertaining format. And, of course, some problem sets later that showcase situations where students are given no choice but to use the standard data structures and algorithms.

What were you doing with FFH? I might have some of your work installed.

I'm a very poor programmer, the only thing I did was edit some Leader files to stack good traits on an Amurite leader in Ashes of Erebus so I could try to make an archmage Master of all the elements and achieve omnipotence.

I did the More Leaders Modmod!

The coding was extremely low-quality and the Python was probably buggy as hell. But it was mine.

EDIT: Wait, I think Ashes of Erebus did end up incorporating some of my work! How's that project going, by the by?

I think Ashes is basically finished. They added a race of Hamstalfar, hamsters lording over elves. That broke my immersion somewhat.

Was your More Leaders anything to do with the Minor/Emerging leaders in Ashes of Erebus?

I added a bunch of minor leaders, but I didn't do any of the mechanics behind Minor Leaders in general.

I... did not much like the Hamstalfar.

I also have the experience that I am incapable of remembering things that are not applicable.

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