Blog Post!

Well, I hope everyone had a good Halloween weekend. I personally spent it at the museum looking at arthropods, and then watching the shining while eating s'mores, so I'd consider it a weekend well spent. I'm not really sure as to what else I have to say, to be honest. The random and input variables are just a continuation on Scratch, and I talked about what I liked and disliked about that last post. I suppose I do like it much better now that we have those statements, because it gives a lot more freedom to the programmer. Instead of the program only reacting in one, preset way every single time, we can now make them react different ways, sometimes in completely random ways in different situations. In addition, the inputs help give a level of interaction that's much more useful (and enjoyable) than just clicking the start button and watching it go through its motions. It means that changing the way the program acts can happen in the middle of running it, provided you anticipated needing to change something. So, I guess they're helpful in that they give greater control to whoever's running the program, to sum it up. I suppose that's enough to make them worth learning.

Scratch

I think that Scratch is a very good introductory programming language. One thing that sets it well above many others is the way it presents itself. Rather than just popping up a command window and asking you to get started, it offers a selection of different possible commands, and all in a very clean visual style that makes it look much less complex and more approachable. This does have a downside, however, in that it feels a little limited. That all of the possible commands, or at least the commands they are directly derived from, are presented means that you can't really include every command there. This limits the capability of it to a fair degree, but I think its perfectly adequate for anything being done by beginners like us. So, for a summary, Scratch is, I believe, good as an introductory language, but its usefulness decreases quickly as the programs being created get more complex.

The Quiz

There wasn't a whole lot else that happened during the class that week, so might as well. I don't feel that this html  quiz was extremely good. I like the concept of testing on the various html commands, and most of the questions were fine, but I still didn't like all of it. Several of the questions were just things I had never really had to use for my webpage, or only used once way back at the beginning of learning about html, and so it couldn't be recalled to memory. I can't recall any specific questions at the moment, but I know there at least a few that seem to be a bit too obscure to be on there. Still, there were plenty of questions, and a curve on top of that, so I suppose any complaints on the subject fall flat just a little. Something to perhaps consider for next time, though.

More HTML!

Html seems to me, after about a week of working with it, to be one of those "easy to learn, impossible to master" type of skills. The basic tools are pretty simple, and you can create a really bad looking, but functional website very easily. However, in order to do any of the interesting stuff, with animations and the like, you have to include long strings of instruction, which can quickly become incomprehensible if you're not paying enough attention. I suppose that I do like the feeling of satisfaction as I get a particularly tricky aspect of the html or the stylesheet, but implementing certain aspects of the webpages got really frustrating sometimes. I wouldn't ask for it to be easier, since lots of its elements are very simple, and I like a challenge, but it would be nice if html and other code could be a little more comprehensible.

Another Post!

I like html. I really do. Sure, its just a markup language, but its easy to learn, works intuitively, and can be used to make some pretty cool stuff. That it was so easy was in fact kind of surprising to me. As someone with only a little bit of experience with programming and code, that even html could be picked up so easily was unexpected. I suppose I always unconsciously pictured programming as an impenetrable cloud of numbers and punctuation, that somehow completes a task. In any case, that some form of programming, even if its not really a programming language, a\can be picked up in a day or two by a (near) novice is encouraging, if nothing else. If I can manage html alright, then maybe I'm competent enough to move on to the harder stuff soon.