Tell HN: My child's first program

#dadjokes #swooosh

Hah, I think one of my first computer programs I wrote on my own looked something like this:

    while (true) {
        cout << "Fuck!";
    }

Every Commodore 64 in every department store that I went to was running that loop (but with "Hello") after I left.

I did this probably too many times in Radio Shacks as a kid, using a word with one less letter (along with a space to generate a nice diagonal pattern on the screen).

Yep, pretty close to my first program on an original TRS-80.

Sounds like copying from GitHub with extra steps

Create me a flutter app that has a list of todo items. Each item has a timer. The list shows one item at the top and when it's timer finishes the next one in the list moves to the top.

That prompt, or something like it, generated Futter code along with the instructions of how to modify a default flutter app for the code to work.

I haven't ran the code yet, but all the other code samples I asked for worked.

Asking for a ruby Student, Teacher application where the student takes multiple courses and the teacher can assign a grade to each course.

After you get that code, you can clarify in your next question.

I want each course to have progress steps.

More generated ruby code..

Can you add a grade for each progress step, and can the teacher have the ability to unlock the next progress steps.

Generates more code.

Then.

Generate me a react front end for this.

Generates React code.

I didn't install/run the code, but it looked accurate and had comments explaining what the lines of code did.

----

GitHub code works, ChatGPT code works, and does exactly what you want, and you can modify it just by asking.

"Change the progress array to be an object that has a grade, started date, finished date and parent acknowledgement."

That actually works as an example after the bot generated the initial app.

We're in for a world of changes.

IME no - but its NLP is much better than any search engine, so it's a lot easier to get a more specific answer/example.

Vs. searching for results on StackOverflow and similar, you'd probably have to combine results on 'how to basic flutter app', 'intro to programming', 'todo list example app [perhaps not in flutter]', and even then it wouldn't be exactly what you wanted if you were looking for specific requirements.

I think it's a great way to ensure that the only motivation your kids have is external. "What's the point of doing X is no one offered me a phone for it"

When I was a kid, I heard that some friends were getting money from parents as a reward for good grades. I always had good grades so I suggested to my mom that I should get money for good grades. She said "No, because then you'll get used to only work hard when I'm offering you money". At the time my take away was just "no money, got it." But now I think it was actually an insightful observation.

That was my experience with it, too. The feedback time is just too long for autodidactic play. Leetcode style stuff and hacking stuff together in Python? Fantastic.

That said, I did get really into Mindstorms when I went to summer camp that split the days between that in the morning and 3D modeling in the afternoons. Once the time was more structured, the feedback loop of "modify working code on a working robot and see what happens" was very fulfilling.

Yuuup. My favorite instance in I think 9th grade was opening the computer case while the teacher was out so I could pop out the CMOS battery to disable the BIOS password, boot a live disk without the disk protection software (Deep Freeze), edit the Win95 boot logo screen[1] to put a little smiley face in the corner, and then put it all back together (sans BIOS password, since I never knew what it was originally!). No one ever mentioned it, but I'd see my little smiley every time that PC booted. Later, I spent 13 years working in reverse-engeering-related software :)

[1] https://www.dslreports.com/faq/3880

The default admin password for a popular educational software that locked down Windows was "changeme". My school did not change the password.

its excellent! my school only let us modify files in our user network folder, and locked down anything on the C: drive. Turns out, if you could open cmd (you weren't allowed directly, but you could ask a vba script from excel to open one) you could just rename the C: drive to the K: drive or whatever, and that wasn't blocked lol. I'd use it to hide games like https://wz2100.net/ on particular computers, and show my mates which ones were on which computers, and make little excel files that had macros to open them

Heck, when I write throwaway scripts most of my variables are different slang terms for feces. Sure, I use foo, bar, baz, bing sometimes too. But I never grew up either. At some point I decided that was a Good Thing, and I have no further plans to mature.

I must be old-fashioned! My variable names in throwaway programs tend to be x, y, and z and my iteration variables tend to be i, j, and k.

In college, usually a few minutes before an assignment was due, I'd frantically Ctrl+F the project for various curse words.

Nice. I vividly remember the days, sometimes in the 80s, in some university cellar, hacking away at our green-lit vt terminals connected to some vaxens, that one of the other regulars in the room and I used temp variables _hudli_ and _tralla_ as some kind of ritual.

heck, in MY time, variables could only have 2 (significant) letters, so we were stuck with "hi", "jk", "ah" and things like our initials....

The good thing is that since only 2 letters were significant, the variables "fa", "fart", "fan", "fall" etc. were all treated the same, which could cause some confusion to people not familiar with the intricacies of C64 BASIC ;-)

Are you serious?! That is so hilarious to me, because I do the same thing! And I am always so terrified that I will get an interview, and they will want to see a sample of my code, and I will have forgotten to take out all the bits of juvenile humor that are scattered through the code of my personal projects!

I actually try to not do that now. As they say, programming is the art of naming and I think forcing myself to think about what a variable is (and then using that name) leads to better outcomes.

Agree for throwaway work it may not matter but I try to keep myself disciplined anyway. A good example is say I am doing an advent of code and the temptation is to treat it as throw away code. But the reality is, sometimes I put it down and come back to it, and having variables like fart doesn't really help snap back into the context.

Not saying this is an absolute but I find it a general rule of thumb for myself

lol nice find

The linked "dog story" is an.. eye opener, too:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/95dgrx/i...

Surprisingly I did get pulled into a meeting with the CEO and a sales/custcare guy because of a similar issue.

I wrote functions that are available for the users to use (they can customize their own dashboard). Our function conventions are camelCase. The function I wrote was something along the lines of `cumOnMetric` or something like that.

Needless to say some square somewhere thought this was a joke and didn't like it. So there I was, just blinking away and wasn't even aware this was something sensitive. It was funny sure, but I didn't have the idea that it was "unprofessional". I still feel the idea of professionalism is quite a club thing.

But yeah we got our first snake_case function name because of that.

Much like the parent's comment, we all need to fart somewhere too

My first was a car (seen from above) driving up the screen, disappearing from the top by printing empty lines below it, and then appearing from the bottom after 24 empty lines.

I thought it was the greatest trick ever. Meanwhile my brother was reimplementing every game he saw, including Tetris and some early Mario game.