12 ms·

Congratulations! I showed your project to my 12 year old son who has just started to learn programming (in JS no less!) and his jaw dropped. In addition to be

by sramam 8y ago

Congratulations! I showed your project to my 12 year old son who has just started to learn programming (in JS no less!) and his jaw dropped. In addition to being a programmer, you are now a role-model. Really well done.

liamilan 8y ago
Thanks a ton! Tell your son that it took me a while, and a lot of work, but it feels great to finish something (there are a lot of projects that I don't finish...). I began learning using Scratch a long time ago. They even featured me last year (the project was a solar system in which I used sine and cosine to calculate the rotation of the planets). I then used blocklike.js to move to JS. I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I like The Coding Train, Carykh, and Code Bullet, and I get a lot of my ideas from their projects.
- rothron 8y ago
  I've got a 10 year old who's been making a lot of stuff in Scratch since he was 6. I've been trying to think of how to phase him over to less limited languages and wasn't aware of blocklike.js, so thank you for that idea. Having a lot of projects that you don't finish is completely normal, so don't worry about that.
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  > there are a lot of projects that I don't finish... You and me both. :)
  - dajohnson89 8y ago
    He's one of us :)
- samstave 8y ago
  Startup Idea: Start a slack/discord group for aspiring students between the ages of [pick your age range, say (8-18)] and start a mentoring/support group with these like-minds... You'll learn, build relationships and some of you will go off and found companies together.
  - elliotec 8y ago
    Starting a Slack group for students is a good idea, but decidedly not a startup idea.
    - wolco 8y ago
      What about a saas to support the companies providing groups for slack.
  - _hardwaregeek 8y ago
    I've considered building a "coding buddies" site. Something that's been lacking about the whole Codecademy/Hacker Rank/etc sites is the lack of intrinsic motivation. An actual person with whom you can work could potentially provide that.
    - samstave 8y ago
      Yeah thats what I was inferring... Basically - start a slack, find a bunch of people like him - pick a project to build together that suits their need (coding buddies) and build the tool. Kind of like when I was trying blacksmithing, the teacher makes you make your tools first.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jakecopp 8y ago
    I'm 21 but I wish something like this existed when I was younger!
    - kazinator 8y ago
      I'm 47. There were computer camps and clubs when I was a kid. They probably took a downturn, though, as computing went mainstream and turned into consumption of video games and, later, online socializing. Maybe you were either too late, or too early, depending on perspective. :)
- sramam 8y ago
  sine and cosine last year? Now I want to know what your parents are feeding you!!! ;)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - kazinator 8y ago
    I also picked up sine and cosine at around that age; it was thanks to programming. Various example BASIC programs (e.g. Lissajous curve and circle plotters and such) used those functions and from their behavior I kind of picked up the relationship to both undulation and the circle. I found out about the arctangent function, and from that I realized that it could be used for 3D projection. I made a proof-of-concept program that mapped some connected points in 3D (boxes and whatnot) to 2D by calculating the visual angles using arctangents: i.e. I plotted the angle between the line of sight and each point, rather than a simple planar projection. It resulted in the objects appearing in a very nice "fish eye" perspective on the screen, which was very pleasing. From all that I learned about radians also and how there are "two pi" of them in a circle, since the functions accepted radians and not degrees. You know how they say that necessity is the mother of invention; it's also the mother of learning trigonometric functions and whatever else.
    - jwdunne 8y ago
      Similar age for sin/cos. I wanted to move a game object in a circle that I used to develop amateur content for. I remember being wowed by light displays some scripters put together at the time (there was no particle system at the time). By the time it came around, I was disappointed to learn about all the "triangle stuff". I want quite there enough to make the link between right angle triangles and a circle but it made that topic so much easier to connect. Thanks to programming and the thought patterns it drums into you, I was able to do my maths course work in a few pages (far less than anyone else) but still achieve high marks. I remember one top performer in my class complained to my teacher because of how little I'd produced! The teacher said "doesn't matter - he used an approach that let him do that".
    - 8y ago
flavio81 8y ago
>I showed your project to my 12 year old son who has just started to learn programming (in JS no less!) It would be much better if he would start with Scratch, Processing, Smalltalk, or even Python. On JS he'll have to lose time coping with complicated build tools, horrible package system, async etc.
- rymate1234 8y ago
  You need none of those things to get started with JS development It’s still perfectly possible to just create a html document, shove in a script tag, and start developing And if you want to use packages from the npm ecosystem you can easily use https://unpkg.com/ https://unpkg.com/
- skeeterbug 8y ago
  Is this serious? I started programming around 9 or 10 on a Commodore 64. I would go to the local library to get programming books for it. Now you can hit F12 in your browser and get a powerful console into JS. JS is fine, encourage the thirst for knowledge.
  - not_kurt_godel 8y ago
    JS is an objectively bad programming language. It is not fine, it is just annoyingly common and convenient. The main advances in its ecosystem are related to transpiling it from other, saner, languages. If he has fun writing JS, then great for him. He's 12, he'll do it if he wants. But it'd be doing him a disservice not to open his eyes to much wider, greener pastures of the programming world.
    - cztomsik 8y ago
      JS was my second language (around the same age as he is, which is more than 15 years ago) and it is still my favourite one. You give zero arguments but I won't make the same mistake: - devtools are unmatched for browser development (and getting better for node) - absolutely best language for prototyping (dyn. typing, monkey-patching, eval, and a lot of other "evil" things you usually don't need in further phases but it's really great to have them for this exploratory phase) - I respect that some people prefer static typing and code-completion but I prefer writing tests and having few well-known libraries for which I don't need completion at all - no threads, no mutexes, no locks - object literal, rest-spread, destructuring, classes are just ordinary (and mutable) objects, etc... If you think people are doing JS just because it's the only language in the browser (not true anymore) you should seriously reconsider. There were to-js compilers before and it was always awful (remember gwt? dart?) Of course, it depends on use-case, JS is not the best language for everything.

by sramam 8y ago

liamilan 8y ago

Thanks a ton! Tell your son that it took me a while, and a lot of work, but it feels great to finish something (there are a lot of projects that I don't finish...). I began learning using Scratch a long time ago. They even featured me last year (the project was a solar system in which I used sine and cosine to calculate the rotation of the planets). I then used blocklike.js to move to JS. I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I like The Coding Train, Carykh, and Code Bullet, and I get a lot of my ideas from their projects.

rothron 8y ago
I've got a 10 year old who's been making a lot of stuff in Scratch since he was 6. I've been trying to think of how to phase him over to less limited languages and wasn't aware of blocklike.js, so thank you for that idea. Having a lot of projects that you don't finish is completely normal, so don't worry about that.
FactolSarin 8y ago
> there are a lot of projects that I don't finish... You and me both. :)
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  He's one of us :)
samstave 8y ago
Startup Idea: Start a slack/discord group for aspiring students between the ages of [pick your age range, say (8-18)] and start a mentoring/support group with these like-minds... You'll learn, build relationships and some of you will go off and found companies together.
- elliotec 8y ago
  Starting a Slack group for students is a good idea, but decidedly not a startup idea.
  - wolco 8y ago
    What about a saas to support the companies providing groups for slack.
- _hardwaregeek 8y ago
  I've considered building a "coding buddies" site. Something that's been lacking about the whole Codecademy/Hacker Rank/etc sites is the lack of intrinsic motivation. An actual person with whom you can work could potentially provide that.
  - samstave 8y ago
    Yeah thats what I was inferring... Basically - start a slack, find a bunch of people like him - pick a project to build together that suits their need (coding buddies) and build the tool. Kind of like when I was trying blacksmithing, the teacher makes you make your tools first.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jakecopp 8y ago
  I'm 21 but I wish something like this existed when I was younger!
  - kazinator 8y ago
    I'm 47. There were computer camps and clubs when I was a kid. They probably took a downturn, though, as computing went mainstream and turned into consumption of video games and, later, online socializing. Maybe you were either too late, or too early, depending on perspective. :)
sramam 8y ago
sine and cosine last year? Now I want to know what your parents are feeding you!!! ;)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kazinator 8y ago
  I also picked up sine and cosine at around that age; it was thanks to programming. Various example BASIC programs (e.g. Lissajous curve and circle plotters and such) used those functions and from their behavior I kind of picked up the relationship to both undulation and the circle. I found out about the arctangent function, and from that I realized that it could be used for 3D projection. I made a proof-of-concept program that mapped some connected points in 3D (boxes and whatnot) to 2D by calculating the visual angles using arctangents: i.e. I plotted the angle between the line of sight and each point, rather than a simple planar projection. It resulted in the objects appearing in a very nice "fish eye" perspective on the screen, which was very pleasing. From all that I learned about radians also and how there are "two pi" of them in a circle, since the functions accepted radians and not degrees. You know how they say that necessity is the mother of invention; it's also the mother of learning trigonometric functions and whatever else.
  - jwdunne 8y ago
    Similar age for sin/cos. I wanted to move a game object in a circle that I used to develop amateur content for. I remember being wowed by light displays some scripters put together at the time (there was no particle system at the time). By the time it came around, I was disappointed to learn about all the "triangle stuff". I want quite there enough to make the link between right angle triangles and a circle but it made that topic so much easier to connect. Thanks to programming and the thought patterns it drums into you, I was able to do my maths course work in a few pages (far less than anyone else) but still achieve high marks. I remember one top performer in my class complained to my teacher because of how little I'd produced! The teacher said "doesn't matter - he used an approach that let him do that".
  - 8y ago

flavio81 8y ago

>I showed your project to my 12 year old son who has just started to learn programming (in JS no less!) It would be much better if he would start with Scratch, Processing, Smalltalk, or even Python. On JS he'll have to lose time coping with complicated build tools, horrible package system, async etc.

rymate1234 8y ago
You need none of those things to get started with JS development It’s still perfectly possible to just create a html document, shove in a script tag, and start developing And if you want to use packages from the npm ecosystem you can easily use https://unpkg.com/ https://unpkg.com/
skeeterbug 8y ago
Is this serious? I started programming around 9 or 10 on a Commodore 64. I would go to the local library to get programming books for it. Now you can hit F12 in your browser and get a powerful console into JS. JS is fine, encourage the thirst for knowledge.
- not_kurt_godel 8y ago
  JS is an objectively bad programming language. It is not fine, it is just annoyingly common and convenient. The main advances in its ecosystem are related to transpiling it from other, saner, languages. If he has fun writing JS, then great for him. He's 12, he'll do it if he wants. But it'd be doing him a disservice not to open his eyes to much wider, greener pastures of the programming world.
  - cztomsik 8y ago
    JS was my second language (around the same age as he is, which is more than 15 years ago) and it is still my favourite one. You give zero arguments but I won't make the same mistake: - devtools are unmatched for browser development (and getting better for node) - absolutely best language for prototyping (dyn. typing, monkey-patching, eval, and a lot of other "evil" things you usually don't need in further phases but it's really great to have them for this exploratory phase) - I respect that some people prefer static typing and code-completion but I prefer writing tests and having few well-known libraries for which I don't need completion at all - no threads, no mutexes, no locks - object literal, rest-spread, destructuring, classes are just ordinary (and mutable) objects, etc... If you think people are doing JS just because it's the only language in the browser (not true anymore) you should seriously reconsider. There were to-js compilers before and it was always awful (remember gwt? dart?) Of course, it depends on use-case, JS is not the best language for everything.