Friday, November 25, 2011

If

Nested If loops are frustrating. I still like them, because I find the complexity of layers upon layers of different loops enjoyable, but they are kind of hard to figure out nonetheless. Their behavior in certain situations can be very strange. Sometimes, just for what seems like no reason, a loop will just get stuck on one condition and never switch over to the others, resulting inevitably in a very messy Jeroo demise. Other times, it'll ignore certain conditions no matter what. All I can say is thank goodness that we've learned some shortcuts for those.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Jeroo

Jeroo is a very good intermediary language between a drag-and-drop menu one like Scratch, and something purely language based, like Python. It provides a set of pre-determined capabilities, within the context of moving around the Jeroo and having it manipulate the world. Due to its limited set of functions, and the clear context for the commands, it still maintains the ease of access of Scratch. However, it also helps to introduce how programming languages, specifically Python, handle code. It helps you figure out how code should be laid by giving you a small set of commands, and allowing you to figure out how best to string together lines of code, and the general syntax of python. So, it helps to ease you into the language, while still maintained a limited level of control that prevents the programmer from getting overwhelmed by all the available commands, and gives context to those commands so that they're more understandable.