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Ask HN: How can I get started with programming?

1 points by FalconNine ↗ HN
I asked a question a few weeks ago about the best language to start with programming, and someone suggested to instead come up with a project and learn what I need to complete it. So I'd like to try to create a text adventure, something like Zork. What advice do you have?

2 comments

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CaiGengYang
I would start with Python ... its a great language and very powerful. Here's a great essay on Python by Paul Graham ... paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Jtsummers
There are a number of good languages for this. Python is probably the most mainstream. I'll recommend it or other languages with a REPL [0]. The reason being, you can write your code in your .py (or whatever language) file, load it into the REPL and test out bits of it very quickly:

  > game.move(north)
  You can't, the door is shut.
  > game.look()
  You're standing on a path. There's a house to the
  north. A mailbox is present. The path continues south,
  into the woods.
You don't have to deal with everything from the start, in particular you don't have to get the parser working to try out the functional elements of the game. It's really nice for exploratory programming.

Also, take a look at Inform [1]. It's a language/engine designed for text adventures. It's not exactly a standard looking language, as it's very domain specific, but it may give you some ideas for the things your game engine will need to track, and ideas for how to structure things.

[0] REPL: Read-eval-print-loop. This describes the process of the interactive environment that's paired with the language. It reads what you've sent it, evaluates it, prints the output, and repeats.

[1] http://inform7.com/