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Hacking the Shell
https://github.com/umd-coding-workshop/website/wiki
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Chris Bosh Says "Learn to Code" #42

Open spurioso opened 11 years ago

spurioso commented 11 years ago

This is an NBA basketball player. "Learn to code," he says, in an editorial published in Wired

SLDC commented 11 years ago

"On The Dime"

Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 11:50:12 -0700 From: notifications@github.com To: website@noreply.github.com Subject: [website] Chris Bosh Says "Learn to Code" (#42)

This is an NBA basketball player. "Learn to code," he says, in an editorial published in Wired

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

alifabeta commented 11 years ago

He says "learn to code" and then the only code language he actually references is Binary, talking about "1s and 0s" three times. Sorry, Bosh, but if you're trying to get your message across (and it's a good message) then maybe talk about some of the languages that look more like English and therefore are more understandable. Yes, you'll still be manipulating "1s and 0s," but not directly, because who really wants to type out 01110111 01101001 01101110 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111? Much better to:

print "winning"

daslerr commented 11 years ago

To me, Bosh's essay spoke to the desire to understand how things work on a fundamental level, and he was really just using the "1s and 0s" example as a stand in for "the root of all things." I found this appealing, personally. Probably because it mirrors my own motivations.

That being said, I agree that using the binary representation of the word winning is dorky to the max and might not win him many followers. :)

And since Friday is a good day for pedantry, I would offer that, technically speaking, binary isn't a "language," since there's no structure. You can encode things in binary, yes, but it's just a number system. It's like when you made secret codes when you were a kid by saying that A = 1, B = 2, etc. You had to know what the encoding system was to read it, but you were really just encoding English, not coming up with a whole new language. The letters were represented in a different way, but the structure of what to do with them, what they "mean," and what combinations make sense all came from English, not your secret code.

If anybody wants to get chatty about binary and/or other number systems, we can start a new thread. :D