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

[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.