Here's a few more:
http://www.squeak.org/
http://toontalk.com/ (which we use in WebLabs - http://www.weblabs.eu.com)
http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/karel.html and http://xkarel.sourceforge.net/eng/
And of course, the queen mother of educational languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language
And some more listed on: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/98/6/roschelle-04.html
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Take a look at processing: www.processing.org. It was designed to teach programming to artists, but in the end you end up learning Java. It's free, and it runs under Linux.
If you do install it, take a look at the examples to see how easy it is to code up very impressive results.
The big plus is that you get incredibly cool results really quickly, so beginers are gratified immediately. This encourages them to try things out and to learn more.
Michael
On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Wednesday 26 January 2005 21:18, Micha Feigin wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:03:41 +0200
Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wednesday 26 January 2005 18:04, Micha Feigin wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:52:14 +0200
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yedidyah Bar-David) wrote:
On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:25:58AM +0200, Ira Abramov wrote:
Quoting Tzafrir Cohen, from the post of Wed, 26 Jan:
On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 04:28:12PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
first also makes people use c++ as a functional language instead of as
an OO
language.
Just to get the terminology right: I figure you meant "procedural".
every 9-12 months, this argument about the best first language comes up. half of the people arguing with opinions they won't gudge from and half trying to throw in half-knowledgable remarks to show they too exist, and never does anyone agree.
so allow me to add to the tradition! Python, gentlemen! it can be OO or Procedural (and even pure functional I was once told). the syntax is clean, very little syntactic sugar, no odd compilersyntax for a newbie to learn, richer than Java, clearer than C and C++, and more widely used in the practical world than Pascal or LISP.
And, may I add, has a nice, free book, called "Learning with Python".
Maybe not as deep as "Structure and Interpretation ...", but not bad
either.
Notice that "Structure and Interpretation ..." is not a lisp book, it
used lisp as a tool. Will have to look at learning python though,
always wondered if its going to be useful enough for me to spend the
time learning, although I think that for my work I am stuck with matlab
and c (really don't feel like learning fortran at this point ;-)
Well, Perl, Python and friends can be used for many tasks for which
neiter Matlab nor C would be very suitable. Things like text processing
and generation, GUI programming, system administration, database
handling, networking, etc.
Of course, the combination of Matlab and C would be more suitable for
different tasks. I used Matlab extensively at the Technion, and I was
very impressed by the ease of programming certain tasks by translating
them to tensors' manipulation. Of course, Matlab as a language (from the
CS point-of-view) sucks pretty badly and it also has a very limited
debugger.
There is a Perl extension called PDL (= Perl Data Language), which aims
to supply Perl with the same functionality as Matlab and similar
programs. (http://pdl.perl.org/). I suppose there are similar extensions
for other agile languages.
Worked a bit with PDL and it was nice, IIRC there is a similar extension
to python, but I have no experience with it.
I think it's called SciPy. I think it's not as complete as PDL, which is itself not as complete as Matlab.
There is scilab which is a nice free matlab like environment. I don't have much experience with it wither but it seems better then octave.
Yes. Scilab, however, is incompatible with Matlab in its syntax (some things
there are more powerful, or otherwise different). There's a program that
converts Matlab code to Scilab one, but not the other way around.
There are also numerous libraries for c (a lot of them written in fortran
BTW) which allow you to do almost anything.
Hmmm.. yes.
I'm somewhat stuck with matlab, with occasional excursions to c though since I need to collaborate with others.
OK.
BTW, I heard from some people who wrote programs in Matlab for their
projects and home-assignments, that took hours on end to run. My programs
never took a
Depends on how they wrote them and how heavy the computation is. I have
well written programs that can run for several hours but considering the
program built a 50,000x50,000 matrix and then computed the first 3000
eigenvalues I think three hours is a short time.
Right. I don't suppose the same program in C would have been much faster.
lot of time to run, but then again, I knew how to translate them into
efficient Matrix manipulations. Is it normal for some Matlab program to
take a lot of time to run, even if it's well-written, or does this
indicate Matlab illiteracy?
If you write your code to use matrix notation it will run rather fast.
Matlab can be rediculosly slow with loops. I tried writing the same code
using matrix notation and loops and it turned out to be a difference of a
few seconds compared to over an hour.
:-) Nice.
BTW matlab also has a profiler and you can alway use the internal compiler
to make faster running executables.
OK.
(Matlab is interpreted by default, but its matrix operations and many built-in-functions are hard-coded.)
You can also write extenssions in c and java.
Right. Of course, most students don't have the knowledge and/or time constraints to do this.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/
Knuth is not God! It took him two days to build the Roman Empire.
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