programming-for-dummies

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Teaching Languages
If the idea of using a “kid’s” programming language to figure out programming
bothers you, grab a copy of KPL’s more sophisticated version, Phrogram
(www.phrogram.com). Like KPL, Phrogram is free. (If you want to compile
your video games into programs that you can give or sell to others, buy the
commercial version of Phrogram.)
Both KPL and Phrogram use a proprietary language that combines the readability
of Pascal with the object-oriented features of more advanced languages,
as shown in the following example:
Program HelloWorld
Method Main()
PrintLine (“Hello, World!”)
End Method
End Program
The goal of KPL and Phrogram is to make programming simple, easy, and fun
by focusing on graphics, sound, and animation so you can create video
games. After you know how to program with KPL or Phrogram, you can
migrate to more popular languages later.
Alice
The latest programming technique for creating, organizing, and maintaining
large programs is object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, figuring out
object-oriented programming can be difficult, especially for beginners who
already have enough trouble just figuring out how to program a computer.
So to help beginners understand object-oriented programming, Carnegie
Mellon University has created a free programming language dubbed Alice
(www.alice.org). To make programming fun and teach object-oriented
principles at the same time, Alice lets beginners write simple programs to
animate characters on the screen, as shown in Figure 3-3.
When you write an Alice program, your commands create an animated character
on-screen. Then you need to write additional commands to tell that
animated character how to move to create a simple story. In the process of
telling the animated character how to move, you wind up discovering both
how to program and how to use object-oriented principles while having fun
in the process.
Like most teaching programming languages, Alice programming uses plain
English commands, like move forward or play sound. By using simple
commands, Alice lets you focus on understanding the principles of objectoriented
programming without getting bogged down in understanding the
peculiar syntax of a specific programming language.