Fwd: Where in the World is John Resig? | Nettuts+

[Owen Densmore]

In a recent post on Nettuts

   

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/where-in-the-world-is-john-resig/

..

John Resig 

discusses Kahn Academy and its computer science curriculum he's working on.

Not so surprisingly, John is using JavaScript as the language .. which in earlier discussion on Friam and Wedtech was felt to be difficult .. JS is pretty quirky.

-- Owen

The initial CS curriculum you’re building is focused on teaching programming principles using the JavaScript language (which seems obvious). Where do you plan on taking it in the future?

We use JavaScript and Processing.js and a real-time programming environment to give students an easy way to get started and interact with the code. We’ve recently been finding ways to get students to collaborate on each other’s work. When we launched, we included the ability for students to “fork” each other’s code. We’ve added in some ways to make these forks easily discoverable which has resulted in a number of students building off of each other’s work. It’s fascinating to see it in progress!

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[Barry MacKichan]

Well, yes, there is wtfjs.com. But don't you think it is pretty easy to avoid all these edge cases?

When I was at Microsoft, someone on the C++ compiler team put notices on his door regularly, sort of a prototype wtfc++.com. There were a number of cases where Stroustrup said something like, "Well, when programmers were asked what happens in this case, 70% chose A and 30% chose B, so you should implement A." I was amused but not worried, because my principle is that if I can't figure out what my code means, I don't write it. My feeling is that JS is pretty much the same except there are some things you need to learn to figure out, and there are some weird edge cases that reflect that the language was developed in something like two weeks.

--Barry

On Apr 6, 2013, at 10:55 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

John is using JavaScript as the language .. which in earlier discussion on Friam and Wedtech was felt to be difficult .. JS is pretty quirky.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com