[Techtalk] interpreted vs. compiled languages

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> And because the "why" must always come before the "how". I'm
> working up to some beginning howtos partly because I think it's
> needed, and partly to encourage more people to try a bit of coding.

There isn't enough inherent speed difference between compiled and
interpreted languages that it should affect the language(s) a
beginner chooses to learn.

In programming there's a concept called "premature optimization":
going out of your way to write highly optimized code before you
even know what parts of the program need to be optimized.
You can end up with convoluted code that's hard to read because it's
doing a lot of speed tricks, when in reality the program doesn't
spend much time in that part of the code at all and the part that
really needs to be speeded up is something you never suspected.

A beginner saying "I'm going to learn C because it's the fastest,
and if I write in Python or Javascript it'll be slow because
those are interpreted languages" -- that's premature optimization.
It might just turn out that for the program that beginner is
writing, there's little or no speed difference, and they might have
been able to learn to write code a lot sooner in a different language.

>  [ ... ] everyone who perpetrates whiny helplessness. Current fave
>  peeve: people who spread fear and loathing about the CLI. I'm
>  convinced it is an astroturf campaign; I'd rather believe that

I've always seen F&L about the commandline. Has there been more recently?

I guess it's partly just a matter of how to get started.
If you start an unfamiliar GUI program, you can start by exploring
the menus or hovering over toolbar buttons. If you start a shell --
how do you start? Maybe there need to be more and better howtos
leading people through basic commandline use. Or maybe there
already are plenty of howtos, and they just need to be easier for
people to find.

Actually, one thing I've thought about is making some sort of
interactive learning game that would teach shell use. Anybody
use the old Palms, that had a game called "Giraffe" that was great
for teaching you how to use Grafiti (their handwriting recognition
system)?  Or the built-in tutorials in emacs or vim, where you're
using the editor in order to go through the tutorial.  Something
like that, some little game that would lead you along teaching you
the important shell commands and how to navigate the filesystem.

I've thought about proposing it as a group project on Actionchix,
but never quite get around to writing up a proposal (and honestly,
I'm not really sure how you'd start organizing something like that
-- it's just the germ of an idea).

> BTW, for examples of awesomely excellent noob programming howtos,
> check out Akkana Peck's series on LinuxPlanet. I need to index

Aw ... blush.

	...Akkana