“The time for jacking around with Tesla coils and ball lighting in the garage is over.”
-From the sci-fi movie, Primer
Many people get into software development because it’s fun. They start programming or web applications or how to get the computer to do interesting things, and the learning begins to grow from there. It’s also a […]

I’ve written a small program that can be run from the command line. The ccwd program will copy the current working directory to the clipboard. I wrote it so that I wouldn’t have to right-click, Mark, highlight text in the console window, and press Enter to copy the text of the current working directory.
Now I […]

How should we teach programming?
One of Shimon Schocken’s colleagues says that “Computer science is a thousand layers of abstraction.” This is quite true, and the same applies for programming.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can get more people involved with programming. I don’t necessarily mean programming as professionals, but just to develop […]

This is the basic problem with learning how to program computers these days:

public class Hello
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println(“Hello World!”);
}
}

The above is the Hello World program for Java, arguably one of the most popular programming […]

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (or IYOCGwP “eye-yawk-gwip”) is a book (hopefully a series of books) that teaches Python game programming for kids in the 9 to 12 year old age range. Instead of teaching principles and concepts, each chapter has a complete example of a game and its source code up front, […]

A new video on atheism where I talk about the theist’s concept of moral absolutism and why I think it is an incorrect and impractical view to have.
[youtube JUgb8aIouzI]
Transcript:

Starting Out, by Albert Sweigart
“When starting out,” the sculptor said,
“First lay out your tools with care.
And always remember, through and through,
The most important thing is to prepare.”
The sculptor’s tools were neat and ordered,
His studio was well-lit and clean,
He always began by sweeping eleven times,
And sometimes twelve or thirteen.
Centered was an untouched marble block,
His raw, undeveloped […]

The title comes from an astute commenter named Frank on my last post, Your Ignorance Does Not Make a Programming Language Suck. Many of the comments on the post and the comments on Reddit quickly devolved into precisely the kind of language war I spoke against.
If I were a cynic (and on alternate odd days […]

(It might look like I’m picking on a couple strangers here, because they were the main inspiration for this post. I hold no grudge against them, heck, I don’t even know them. Don’t think that a few words or a few opinions encapsulates a person’s whole personality or intelligence.)
I’m trying to push for more Python […]