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ncase / joy

make happy little programs
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Suggestion: turn comments into comic-book speech bubbles #1

Open canadaduane opened 6 years ago

canadaduane commented 6 years ago

I'm one of your supporters on patreon and I Love what you're doing here. I was a software engineer at a company called Because Learning that helps teach programming and engineering to middle school kids. I've had some time to think about what I wish kids encountered when they program. Here's a suggestion:

Instead of showing the code comments in-line with the program, use them as call-outs or speech bubbles with a character "saying" the thing. So for example, instead of this:

before

It might look something like this:

after

The motivation is to make it really clear to a newcomer that there is a difference between code for the computer and notes for humans. The origin of the idea came from an old Usborne Guide book from the 1980s that taught me how to program in BASIC. :)

canadaduane commented 6 years ago

Some more examples: usborne0 usborne3

windowfinn commented 4 years ago

I still own "Weird Computer Games" which I bought in 1984, but it was published by Scholastic. Purchased for my BBC B. I've been a software engineer for over 20 years now.