The Mighty Oldschool Ti83

[optional106]

Hi all,

I've been lurking in the forums for about a year now, and thought i'd introduce myself as its a public holiday today, and i need to justify that i'm still in bed at 4.00 in the afternoon.

Really excited for the Pandora, and love the community that has built up around it.

I have been reading up, but would love to know where or how to start to get into coding, compiling, building games as some fun on the side.
Unfortunately my expertise are in science, not computing.
I'm a pharmacologist in Hong Kong, and all my tech savvy geeky and nerdy best friends are all in UK or different countries, and i'm not even sure if theres an english speaking Pandora community here in HK

The closest i ever got to coding was writing simple games for my TI83 calculator in sixth form, but that was over a decade ago . Oh my, that really makes me feel old ><
I never would have thought that the gaming handheld i'd be waiting for 11 yrs later would be the powerful younger brother of the TI83 with its awesome 6Mhz power !
( At the time, it was fast, and dial up networking on 56k modems was just getting popular)

The calculators games for the modern TI's look good, Pandora will be amazing, so question is what can I be doing now to try coding?
Is it something beginners shouldn't try?
We all have to start somewhere, right ?

Thank god for the Pandora Toolbar that has made Pandora online resources much more faster and accessible. No more checking into the forums and sites nearly every day ^^

 

[Mithrildor]

If you have no coding experience at coding:

1. Learn C++:
learncpp.com is a great website for peopel with no coding experience at all.
2. Learn SDL:
lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/
3. Learn OpenGL ES
4. Get some practice with coding.

Im currently busy with learning to code too

 

[lulzfish]

You can also try to start with Python, which you might think of as the much more advanced little brother of TI-BASIC.

 

[sindbad]

If you don't have experience in programming, you should try Python CODE
python.org
and Pygame.

Much easier to learn than C++ or C or even Java and actually pleasant to develop in. You won't bump into it's few shortcomings for a long while and by that time it'll be easier for you to learn how to deal with them.

 

[Mithrildor]

If you don't have experience in programming, you should try Python CODE
python.org
and Pygame.

Much easier to learn than C++ or C or even Java and actually pleasant to develop in. You won't bump into it's few shortcomings for a long while and by that time it'll be easier for you to learn how to deal with them.

Why is C++ so hard?

 

[lulzfish]

If I might try to project way back to a few years ago when I didn't really know C++....

uh...

Because you never know which libraries and headers to import?
Pointers are pretty confusing until you've really memorized the syntax, and Java and Python make that a little easier.

Libraries and headers confused me for a while, but now I've learned to just let gcc deal with them.

 

[PoisonedV]

Python is good as an introduction, and will definitely be ported. Although, the absolute easiest is Processing... I discovered it a year or two ago and although i was already far past it in complexity of coding i still reccomend it to newcomers whenever I get. it wouldnt work well on the pandora because its a scripting language for java but it would ease you better into more complex languages if you're having trouble getting over a wall or something

 

[sindbad]

Why is C++ so hard?
Put simply, it's just too low level.

And it's not just hard to learn, but its productivity is crap compared to dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript. C++ or C should only be used when performance is absolutely essential (rare nowadays) or all performance tricks in Python have been exhausted and your game/app is still too slow.

 

[Titcher]

I personally don't feel C++ is hard to learn at all. It gets a bad reputation, like lulzfish mentioned, the only trouble most people have is figuring out what headers to use.

 

[Mithrildor]

Why is C++ so hard?
Put simply, it's just too low level.

And it's not just hard to learn, but its productivity is crap compared to dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript. C++ or C should only be used when performance is absolutely essential (rare nowadays) or all performance tricks in Python have been exhausted and your game/app is still too slow.

C++ isnt crap.

 

[sindbad]

Why is C++ so hard?
Put simply, it's just too low level.

And it's not just hard to learn, but its productivity is crap compared to dynamic languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript. C++ or C should only be used when performance is absolutely essential (rare nowadays) or all performance tricks in Python have been exhausted and your game/app is still too slow.
C++ isnt crap.No, it has its uses. But its productivity IS crap when compared to almost everything else. C++ with Qt is better, but not by much.

 

[Archaemic]

The hell do you mean by "productivity"? Sure, the code is less dense than in Python and there are fewer built-in libraries (by an order of magnitude or two), but it's also faster and allows for more control. The latter problem is solved pretty well by the inclusion of Qt anyway.

But for easy places to start, Python.

 

[VinylPusher]

The hell do you mean by "productivity"? Sure, the code is less dense than in Python and there are fewer built-in libraries (by an order of magnitude or two), but it's also faster and allows for more control. The latter problem is solved pretty well by the inclusion of Qt anyway.

But for easy places to start, Python.

Productivity... as in how long it takes to actually code anything using C++ compared to higher-level languages. It's not just the act of writing the code, but debugging can take longer with C++ due to it being so low level. Some debugging might have you dropping down into machine code.

Effective coding in C++ can be greatly advanced by having an understanding of the underlying hardware and machine code. This was true 10 years ago and it's still true today.

With Python... you just tend to get on with it. You only need concern yourself with your game, it's logic and design rather than worry about the hardware (other than a cursory knowledge of where you're storing your data).

 

[sindbad]

The hell do you mean by "productivity"? Sure, the code is less dense than in Python and there are fewer built-in libraries (by an order of magnitude or two), but it's also faster and allows for more control. The latter problem is solved pretty well by the inclusion of Qt anyway.

But for easy places to start, Python.
Productivity as in how much time does it take to write the same app as opposed to C++, everything else being equal. There's a huge difference. Not to mention in C++ you get harder debugging, more bugs in the first place, more code to deal with (up to 10x usually) and less readability for when you want to fix/change things.

Faster for most operations, but not everything in Python is 100x slower. If it does matter, it's easy to rewrite that one slow function (90% of time is spent in 10% of code) in C or Cython. Not really a problem anymore except for realtime stuff.

More control? Over what? In which cases? I've never felt like I had too little control over things when writing Python code.

Qt helps a lot, I know. C++/Qt is much nicer than Java most of the time. But it's still far away from the conciseness of Python and Ruby.

 

[Mithrildor]

Thats not true, I bet that test is done by someone who has more experience in Python coding than C++ coding. Readability isnt a problem at all aslong as you write it good.

Lets stop this disscussion about the best programming language now, we all know python fanboys defend python and C++ fanboys defend C++

 

[optional106]

Thanks for the suggestions, i'll look them both up ,Python & C++
I know both sides could argue until the cows come home, as both must have their good and bad points.

I'll probably just go with the easiest and most logical though, as everything does seem really intimidating from a non-coders point of view.

 

[bzar]

Both languages have their advantages, but python does have higher productivity. This is backed by various researches. The one I'm most familiar with is done in Lappeenranta university of technology and measures results gained by teaching programming in various programming languages. The paper can be found in ACM digital library (requires access). You can find papers about the subject at
CODE
http://scholar.google.fi/scholar?q=python+teaching&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search
and some at
CODE
http://scholar.google.fi/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=python+productivity+comparison&btnG=Search

In particular I'd like to point out
CODE
http://www.nsl.com/papers/phone/jccpprtTR.pdf

which is not relevant in terms of execution speed or memory consumption (because it's 9 years old), but since the languages themselves haven't changed it can be used to evaluate production speed, program reliability and such.

I would also like to say that IMHO there is no "best programming language", because they all have their good and bad sides. All programming languages have downsides. All of them. The best programming language for a person is the one that he/she is most comfortable coding in. The best programming language for a task is the one that is best suited to it in terms of ease of development and performance.

 

[sindbad]

Read this, very nice book http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/
There's a C++ version of the same book, if you ever want to learn it.

 

[Mithrildor]

Or you throw the books out of the window and you use internet. learncpp.com

 

[Dutch_Cap]

The closest i ever got to coding was writing simple games for my TI83 calculator in sixth form, but that was over a decade ago . Oh my, that really makes me feel old ><
I never would have thought that the gaming handheld i'd be waiting for 11 yrs later would be the powerful younger brother of the TI83 with its awesome 6Mhz power !

TI83, now that bring back some good memories. I spent more time programming in math class than I did doing exercises. The most advanced thing I wrote was minesweeper, in graphical mode. I also made a simple platformer in textmode (graphical mode was too slow for stuff like that).

Also, before any test that involved a calculator, we'd use the cable to share cheatsheets.