Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Pixel_Outlaw on September 05, 2011
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Many people will recall the early days of programming when you got small snippits of code from a magazine and you poked them into your computer.
Sadly, I never had the chance to do this as I did not own a computer until middle school in the 90's.
I think these were a healthy way to teach young people how a computer works. Ideally, you would have to make a simple (but usable) IDE that could compile code and then have monthly releases of programming magazines. Maybe each month you have a handful of programs for them to poke in, spanning no more than around 300 lines. Perhaps they might be able to submit programs and there would he a showcase each month with the winner's name and program code for everyone to try.
I'm not saying I'm going to quit my job and start publishing magazines but it is something that I've been rolling around in my mind for a while.
Do you think it is possible?
Are kids today just as willing as their parents were?
We still have the problems of languages like C not doing much own their own as far as display and sound go but a simple library could be made for the magazine too I suppose.
Thoughts please!
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How about making the mag a coded mag and having the IDE built into it?
Widowmaker released the full source code of the game scene charts;
http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php?topic=4911.msg65632#msg65632
I don't know if that could be adapted to suit?
I like the idea.. Maybe you could even build a website around it including the ide using .net?
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Sounds good to me sadly to say I was one of those guys punching keys just to see what it did..
I like mags like that even at my age, you wont know until you try it and I am sure every one here will do
what they can to help, Go for it!
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I doubt anyone is willing to type in listings nowadays. Even coding books in the late 80s/90s came with source code disks, because people were too lazy to type it all in. The listings in the mags were probably because of price reasons, since disks were pretty expensive to produce then. Today the internet is full of code snippets you can easily copy and paste and then change for your needs. (Given you understand what they are doing.) Of course learning by doing is a good thing. But the typing in part doesn't really help imho. Provide snippets and explain explicitly what's going on. That's what helped me most when trying to learn/understand new stuff. ;)
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I agree with Padman. It's probably a workable idea as long as it's geared toward something specific, but there are countless general programming guides out there already.
Something along the lines of "Democoding in C#" or "Democoding in FreeBasic" would probably work well. That way you could start with easy stuff like 2d star fields and move along to more complex things, such as 3D. The problem with these things is people often jump the the later/cooler stuff without first grasping the basics.
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I doubt that you will get people to type in code from a magazine these days. Back in the early 80s it was more or less the only way to distribute stuff like that and not a lot of people had computers at home at that time. But even from the late 80s to the early 90s it became more and more common that those magazines had discs included which had the code and such on them already, and with the point and click generation of these days you will probably have a hard time getting them to type 300 lines of code which they are not even certain that they will be able to use let alone understand or if it even will work.
There could be a marked for a coding site with its own type of electronic distributed magazine, either in pdf form or as an actual standalone exe which loads articles. But it might just be easier to get people to use a website. Everyone is online a lot these days and it will get more and more difficult to attract people to offline stuff. But still I think that there is a void that could be filled by a website/movement where not just demo coding but game making as well could be promoted and that would have enough of a range to attract all kinds of people regardless of which tool they had decided but where it was more generalized in its approach so that noone would feel left out regardless of technical knowledge.
Not sure the above makes a lot of sense, but just some input on the subject matter. These days you just do not know what will become the next google, facebook, twitter, etc. and especially gaming and game development is jumping leaps and bounds currently and is posed to overtake hollywood movies and music in revenue and everyone and their brother wants go get in on the action it seems, so there could be a large potential for the right idea to gain a large following and potentially make some good money. Its just a matter of getting the right idea. The world is full of ideas and it is always good to throw ideas out there, you never know you might find the right one someday.
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I agree with a lot of things here.
I do think that a digital distribution might be better (for cost reasons and it could be distributed for free).
If the samples were on .pdf format then they would have the option of repetition or simply cut and pasting.
I've always learned code by repetition of programs, I need to punish myself by typing them in to really get the information into my memory. I can still understand people who learn by simply viewing, I think the digital form would present both styles. The biggest thing is supporting Apple, Linux, and Windows. I suppose you could use something like CodeBlocks, but even then you have different configurations for how the different operating systems handle external files and libraries.
I suppose it was a bit easier when everyone had the same computer with the same hardware.
I'm thinking a free monthly .pdf.
I like magazines, they are like a monthly surprise in some ways. A forum could certainly be on the website for the magazine. Magazines just offer something collectible and keep the code in the same place. The examples are sort of set in stone and don't shift around like the data on the forum might. The magazine could showcase talented coders and maybe examples from the forum could be chosen each month as feature articles.
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I'm willing to support this in some way - is there any way I can assist?
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Hi,
interesting topic. I personally grew up with programming magazines. When I typed in my first programm ever - I even typed in dozens lines of comments word by word because I thought they would be needed :-) .At those times source code was hard to get. Even with the upcoming of BBSystems sourcecodes/tutorials were hard to find. So, the paper mags/books were really important.
I still like mags (e.g. HUGI) and books. But I think that it is nowadays really really hard to come up with a regular mag/tutorial of good quality and with a unique content since there are endless sources online already. Personally, I just came across this site http://www.codecademy.com/ (http://www.codecademy.com/) and I really like the interactive approach they take.
Anyway, I do not want to discourage you - but I think it would be a good idea to have some new-media support next to a "written" monthly PDF mag, e.g. a forum to ask questions, downloadable executables/sources etc.
Well, just my 2cts.
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"written" monthly PDF mag
I would be willing to support it and I am sure the rest of us would 8) :)
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I'd buy this! :P