Invent with Python

Al Sweigart gave a presentation of his book, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, to Baypiggies tonight. His book is aimed at kids that are interested in learning how to program. He said he didn't have a particular age range in mind, but I would say from experience it would probably be fine for anyone age 8 to 15 with an interest in computers.

I was impressed with the overall tone and layout of his book. And his choice of teaching programming via writing simple computer games is right on the money. He mentioned that what got him hooked on programming was tinkering around creating simple games when he was kid; I'd venture that was what got a great many of the best engineers I've met started. In addition, he choose to teach programming concepts via Python, which I also agree is a great language for learning because it is expressive, easy to understand, and yet powerful to build professional applications.

In his presentation, Al accurately pointed out that there is a trend to try and simplify programming for kids until it resembles building with duplo blocks and that really isn't helpful for kids nor interesting for them. I concur enthusiastically. Projects like Scratch are neat, but seem patronizing to me. I learned on BASIC and Pascal and I don't doubt kids today are just as capable. That said, BASIC and Pascal are dated now; python is just as easy to learn yet more powerful and modern so it is a great choice.

Another difference between Al's book and many intro books is that his programs are short, fun, and mostly text. Of course, every kid dreams of writing graphical games like the video games they play but that is, frankly, not realistic. Again, Al doesn't lie to his audience; he presents fun text-based games that kids can tinker with. He starts with a simple guessing game, then hangman, tic-tac-toe, and othello. Towards the end of the book, he does introduce pygame and shows how to use it to make simple graphical games, but the vast majority of the book focuses on teaching fundamental concepts via text-based games.

I actually taught introductory computer programming to high school students, age 14 and 15, a number of years ago. Back then we used C, but I was surprised to find that Al presents software concepts in the same order I did and even uses the same games to drive those concepts home. If I could teach the same class today in python, Al Sweigart's Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python is the book I'd want to use.

Overall I was quite impressed with the great job Al did with the book and appreciate him taking the time to talk about it, and the process of writing it, to us at Baypiggies tonight.

P.S. I should mention that he has published the book under the Creative Commons license so it is free to read; you can even download the latest edition off his website. Amazon sells it in dead-tree format too, but you should hold off because the second edition will be going to print soon.

Good Day

All of our sea mail from Japan arrived and was just delivered. In addition, my new MacBook Pro I ordered last week (right after the revision bump) arrived today too. Looks like I'm going to be busy this week. I just hope I can find time to make it to BayPiggies this Thursday.

Subversion sucks

While I was away in Tokyo, NTTMCL switched from CVS to Subversion for their version control system. Perhaps it is just that I'm too accustomed to CVS's eccentricities, but so far I have to say the Subversion sucks. While I'm sitting here waiting for the checkout of one of our heavily-branched repositories to complete (45 minutes and counting!), I took the opportunity to read a little about how much more wonderful Subversion is than CVS.

So far, the best I've come up with is that Subversion is newer, therefore it is better. Yay. With subversion, I just get the delight of knowing I'm playing with a fresh(er) turd.

Sure, CVS sucks too. What bothers me about Subversion is that it sucks at least as much as CVS without giving anything in return. At least with CVS, I can tag a release or create a branch without having to make a whole other copy of the repository (on each developer's machine, no less!). At least with CVS, I can diff and merge files between branches or tags without developing a Repetitive Strain Injury. At least with CVS, the repo files are text so I can recover when it screws up. At least with CVS, I don't have to run a friggin' web server just to do revision control.

So, yeah, maybe I'm just an old fogey. Or maybe Subversion sucks so much, it actually makes me long for CVS. Wouldn't that be sad.

Help me, I'm in RPM Hell

Dear Internet,

Surely there must be a better way to install packages on linux. For better or worse I've been locked in the FreeBSD ivory tower for the better part of 10 years. But now I am assigned to a project that is using linux and I find myself yearning for BSD-style package management. Specifically, I am looking for:

• A way to find a package for my OS (in this case, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 64-bit).
  
• Download that package and the packages for all of its dependencies.
  
• Install a package and all of its dependencies onto a host that is not connected to the Internet.
  
• Is command-line based.
  

In FreeBSD, you can use the FreeBSD packages database to locate the desired package and download it to your system in a format that you can install offline. Getting all of the dependencies it a little trickier, but I wrote a simple perl script some years ago that does that using the FreeBSD ports collection.

Obviously linux has the rpm format for its packages but I'm finding that searching for rpms and identifying all of their dependencies is just as manual of a process as it was 10 years ago. For example, the yum command can install a package and its dependencies, but does not seem to support downloading the rpms for those packages to reproduce the process on an offline machine. Surely there must be a way.

If anyone could point me to a tool for linux that satisfies the 4 goals above, I would be grateful.

P.S. In a case of "it's a small world after all", I went to elementary school through high school with the author of yum, Seth Vidal.