just another hack » programming

Programming with Alice

Oliver — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:44:52 +0000

Speaking of 3D and learning. A few days ago I discoverd Alice, a 3D programming environment. Basically it’s a tool that let’s you create/program animations and simple games via an easy GUI, without having to worry about syntax and typing errors. Meaning the student/learner can concentrate on learning the basics of programing or tell a story, rather than search for a missing semicolon. According to some numbers the site casts around, it is improving the learning curve extremely. Definitely worth looking at for anyone from a hobby programmer to a CS major.

I’d love to hear if anyone already used it and can share their thoughts. I already gave the link to our CS department and am considering to let our trainees work with it.

PHP and OOP

Oliver — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:29:18 +0000

Last week, on our way to the sneak preview, I engaged a little conversation regarding object oriented programming in the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor programming language with the other two geeks (one of them a code-guru). I always wondered if it’s just me, but I never found a good use for OOP in PHP. The thought arose again, when I started to (re)code an old application for public usage (more about that some other day).

Being a scripting language and all, it’s not really suited for this programming paradigm and leads to a lot of overhead, even in middle complex applications. I’m well aware of the benefits of OOP, but they never countervailed the work and overhead in my applications. The only real usage I had were my personal libraries for accessing databases, files and other streams. Really nifty and easy to manage several connections at the same time. Ok, and some layouting here and there. But thats it.

In this conversation it occured that this is not only my train of thoughts. This somehow eases me. I’ll still be looking uses of OOP, but no need to force it, just to have the application look more “professional”.

Bovine tongue?

Oliver — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:57:30 +0000

There are thousands of lists out there, that show how one particular word/phrase is spoken in another language. Like happy birthday and other boring stuff. But there are others as well. Original ones. I’d say the most important one is JUST COWS.

Which reminds me of the days, when I was more into esoteric programming languages. If you’re interested into those and cows as well, try COW. (In case the server is still unavailable, look it up on Esolang.)