I would love it if he found it endlessly fascinating and spent all day programming on his own, but he does need a bit of a push from mom and dad. He enjoys it, but given the choice, he would still rather play games than make them :-)
He reacted very positively to the initial "intro to racket with pictures", which was a contributing factor to settling on Racket. Java / C# work seemed to feel more like homework, but changing numbers and colors in the REPL had him smiling and excited. -----Original Message----- From: François Beausoleil [mailto:francois.beausol...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 2:41 PM To: Racket Users Cc: John Carmack Subject: Re: My son's game in Racket Le lundi 24 août 2015 12:28:07 UTC-4, John Carmack a écrit : > We “released” my 10 year old son’s game that was done in Racket: > www.1k3c.com > > > > I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure > language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, > but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for > a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it. > > > > I can’t recommend 2htdp/universe for this sort of thing, though. I > had to drop to the native GUI bitmaps for performance reasons, hack around > the lifecycle to support a separate editor window, and I still don’t know how > to make the Quit menu item actually exit the app on the Mac version. > > > > I completely understand the reasoning for the way 2htdp/universe is > built, and saying that a “real” project should use the grown-up APIs is fine, > but the evolution from making a little animation to controlling it somehow to > fleshing it out into a game is so natural that recommending a fairly big > rewrite is unfortunate. > > > > I’m a big booster of functional programming, but I’m not sure that the > functional drawing paradigm ever really sank in while my son was working with > it, rather it felt like you just drew everything backwards with missing > parenthesis at the end. I suspect that using the standard imperative GUI > drawing code will make perfect sense to him. > > > > I’m not sure yet if we are going to migrate to the regular GUI code for > upcoming work, or jump all the way to OpenGL so he can learn the joys of “Why > is the screen all black?” > > Hello John, Thanks for sharing. Played a few levels and had fun :) I have a 10 year old daughter. Did your son show interest in programming or did you initiate him yourself? I remember I started when I was 10 years old as well. I'd like to introduce my daughter to programming too, and was wondering when the right time would be. I tried Logo last year, but after 5 minutes, she didn't see any interest in it. Have a great day! François Beausoleil -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
