Coding by playing

[vivdunstan]

Back to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.

Comments

[a_cubed]

One thing that had changed between my undergrad in 88-91 and when I started lecturing in 2000 was that programming became more about building something real from as early as possible, at least where I was teaching. One way that was done at Reading was to provide substantial parts of a larger program pre-written for students and get them to add the functionality needing the parts of programming we wanted them to learn, then having them see something real come out of it.

[vivdunstan]

That sense of reward would really help. Sounds like a great idea. Back in our undergrad days Martin and I were learning first S-algol on Macs, and then for me who continued after first year C and numerous other languages on Unix. It was a very traditional style of programming language tuition. It's nice to see steps to make things more engaging and real for the students.

[andrewducker]

It's always great to find something that clicks for you like that.

[vivdunstan]

It's lovely, yes! I know some people who've been trained like me in traditional imperative programming languages don't take so well to the natural language declarative style of Inform. But I really like it, and it's ridiculously good fun. It probably helps that I studied Prolog for umpteen years long ago. Martin is jealous when I'm coding in it, and wishing his work coding was so much fun to write in!