Programming For Terrified Adults?

makeitreal writes "My mom is getting bored with learning the basics of email and has mastered Solitaire. She asked me what I do on my computer and I told her that I was teaching myself programming in Scheme. She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing, but I tried to teach it to her with the HtDP and we didn't even get past the introductory chapter. Everything I've looked at so far seems too complicated (Scheme, Python, VB) or too childish (Logo, Squeak, Lego Mindstorms). Is there anything in the middle that is also cheap/free and suitable for adults? Or should I give up the whole idea?"

Give up

[Anonymous Coward]

Give up. She'll just be unemployed like the rest of us.

Teaching your mom programming?!

[xYoni69x]

Teaching your mom programming?! What a strange idea... Next you'll be saying Linux is ready for the desktop...

Assembly language

[Laser Lou]

Try teaching her assembly language. There's nothing simpler. Its almost like using a calculator:

load this
load that
add
store ..

That's it!

Brainfuck ?

[BorgDrone]

How about Brainfuck [muppetlabs.com] ?

Seriously though, maybe you should learn her about the von Neumann architecture [wikipedia.org], and let her play with a simple implementation of it. At the very least it let's her help understand the basics of computing.

Re:She probably just want to reach her son.

[retinaburn]

And No! not to your dungeons and dragons meeting, or a Furbiecon.

Core Wars

[j1m+5n0w]

I wonder if many people have used icws94 [koth.org] as a first language?

(For those that have never heard of core wars: the basic idea is you write assembly programs that run in a virtual machine - whichever program has more threads running at the end of a time limit wins. I never got into it, but it looks like fun.)

-jim

Re:HTML

[dogfart]

I'm a dyslexic agnostic with insomnia... I lie awake at night wondering if there really is a dog!

I'm a dog. I lie awake at night wondering if my owner is really a dyslexic agnostic.

Re:Assembly language

[Anonymous Coward]

MOV mom,desk
ADD keyboard,mouse
continue_laughing:
POP open_a_bottle_of_beer
CMP mum,pissed
JMP out_of_the_way
GOTO continue_laughing

out_of_the_way:
RET ;urn_to_laughing_state


INT eresting_experiment

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess x86 assembler is a better choice. If she is a real mom, c++ is the great option. If your mom was a hippie in 60's, perl is the answer. And if your father says she is a pervert, fotrh is the language she is looking forth.

Re:JavaScript

[Jorkapp]

Good luck. I'm still trying to teach my mom to program. And she has a bachelor's degree in CS.

If someone who has a bachelors in CS cannot program, they must have majored in Counter-Strike instead of Computer Science.

* Son killed mom with awp
[Mom] OMG CAMPER FAG
[Son] wtf?

Meanwhile at home

[famazza]

Mom started with Solitaire, then other kind of card games. Then she discovered Boardgames, and I presented here Yahoo Games! Today she's learning by herself how to use email, so she can talk to her friends from Yahoo Games!

Good for her? I don't know. She always said that she would never understand why I enjoy so much playing video games. And now we have to tell her it's time to go to bed at 2 AM :o)

Re:Hypercard

[HyperCash]

"But Hypercard was *perfect* for..."

Only two letters away from perfection... :)

--HC

Re:She probably just want to reach her son.

[makeitreal]

Your comment was funny, but ... I'm female you insensitive clod! Not all geeks are men!

Re:Brainfuck ?

[Tablizer]

She'll wash your mouth out with soap just for saying it.

POV-Ray

[cjameshuff]

The Persistence Of Vision Raytracer. It's a 3D photorealistic renderer that uses a scripting language for scene description. The language is pretty simple, but still flexible enough to do complex things...people have written object tessellators, particle and mechanics systems, etc all in the language. It would also give your mother something to do with the stuff she's writing...make pretty pictures. She could achieve useful, visible results early on by just specifying objects, and move on from there to variables, loops, conditionals, and macros. It's free, runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and there's an extensive on-line community.

http://www.povray.org/

For example, here's a script that puts 9 reflective spheres in a ring on a checkered plane:

camera {
location < 0, 3,-8>
look_at < 0, 0.5, 0>
angle 35
}

light_source {<-5, 8,-3>, color rgb <1, 1, 1>}

plane {y, 0
pigment {checker color rgb < 1, 1, 1>, color rgb < 0, 0, 0>}
}

union {
#local J = 0;
#while(J < 9)
sphere {< 1, 0.25, 0>, 0.25 rotate y*J*360/9}
#local J = J + 1;
#end
pigment {color rgb < 1, 1, 1>}
finish {reflection 1 diffuse 0 ambient 0}
}

Tell her the truth

[Anonymous Coward]

She asked me what I do on my computer and I told her that I was teaching myself programming in Scheme.

I think it's time for you to tell her the truth. Yes, it is embarassing, but she will let you alone and we can stop discussing this subject. Ok? ;-P

Re:HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what the hell is "JAVA"? I know of a programming language named Java. Why arbitarily upper case the name? Why hold the shift key when you don't have to?

Re:She probably just want to reach her son.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, the guy says

It was a girl, not a guy, but I guess you're going to give us a statistical lecture on that too.

Career move?

[Anonymous Coward]

> My mom is getting bored with learning the basics of email
> and has mastered Solitaire.

And you want her to program!? Nonsense. Get her up to speed on
Minesweeper and her MCSE is in the bag!

Re:HTML

[Eideewt]

Because it's a waste to hit caps lock again after only one letter.

Re:HTML

[cortana]

Your caps lock has a limited number of presses? :)

Re:HTML

[prodangle]

One of the teachers I had on high school gave me a negative score on a test because I wrote that HTML is not a programming language.

Dear Miss Manners:
My home economics teacher says that one must never place one's elbows on the table. However, I have read that one elbow, in between courses, is all right. Which is correct?

Gentle Reader:
For the purpose of answering examinations in your home economics class, your teacher is correct. Catching on to this principle of education may be of even greater importance to you now than learning correct current table manners, vital as Miss Manners believes that is.

Re:Qbasic

[sydb]

And now you're on Slashdot! Success!

Re:Career move?

[Anonymous Coward]

The good old
Minesweeper
Consultant and
Solitaire
Engineer ...

Behold!

[kaos.geo]

His mother "expressed an interest in learning what I was doing". Behold, one of the signs of the apocalypse!

Re:Visual Basic??

[Anonymous Coward]

"The brain is a muscle, just like any other, and it deteriorates with age."

Wha Wha What?

"The hard fact is: people are born to do certain things - it's just the way it is."

And apparently, you were not born to be a biologist.

Hobbies

[rueger]

What does Mom do when she is not on the computer? What interests does she have? Who does she e-mail?

My mother in law had only slight interest in computers until she found out that there was a gigantic network of grandmothers who exchanged computer embroidery designs via e-mail.

Or, more accurately, designs featuring characters that are well protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright act. From a company whose name starts with "D"....

Several hundred floppy discs later we bought her a CD burner so she could better manage her booty.

Eventually the Alberta cop who was one of the central figures in this operation was shut down and charged.

Re:HTML

[josu]

I went from HTML to Javascript to Perl.

So you're suggesting HTML is a bad idea...