Why Code 2?
There are far more programming languages in the world than most people realize. The vast majority of them are just variations on other languages, or are only appropriate for very narrow use cases. As an aspiring programmer, you can ignore nearly all of them.
After nearly two decades of teaching and research experience, we feel that it’s very important to teach the right language at the right time. In the case of code2, there isn’t a better option on the market today. It’s free, cross-platform and powerful enough to give students a great introduction to computer science and programming. We’ve also designed our curriculum around this language, so that you’ll have all of your questions answered as you go through our courses.
We advise against learning code2 before completing our beginner courses, but if you’d like to do so anyway, we’ve included some resources below to help you get started.
This is the second post in a series of posts discussing how to write a good piece of software. Previously we discussed some of the qualities of a good piece of software. In this post I will discuss what goes into writing a good piece of software.
The first thing you need to know about writing software is that there are lots of ways to do it. The best way to write software is whatever way works for you. You should try all the different ways, figure out which ones work for you, and then stick with those methods until you find something better.
The second thing you need to know about writing software is that there are lots of opinions about how to write good software, but only one way to write good software: by writing lots of bad software and learning from your mistakes. Take comfort in the fact that if you are struggling or failing, you are in good company; everyone struggles and fails at some point.
If you’re writing a program and you think, “This is going to be really easy,” you should probably go back and make it harder.
Since the beginning of time, every programmer has finished a piece of code and said: “I know I’m missing something. I’ll come back later.” Then they go out for dinner or they take a walk. And while they’re out, they realize what was missing. Then they go back and fix it.
When you’re writing code, the most important thing is to know what you’re trying to accomplish. You should always be asking yourself: What am I trying to do?
When you see something that looks like it might be the thing you’re looking for, check it out by typing it in. Once you’ve seen how it works, it’s yours. You don’t have to remember where you found it, or even what it was called; if you need it again, odds are you can find it in five minutes on Google.
You learn best when someone else is trying to learn something from you. If your goal is to help yourself learn something, then teaching is often the best way to do that. When someone asks me a question about programming that I get stuck on-even if I know
2. It’s one of the most common words in English, and it appears in two-thirds of all English sentences.
3. It’s a number that shows up in math a lot, and is therefore easy for humans to talk about.
4. You can do almost anything with a 32-bit number, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space for your variable names. The only thing you can’t do is address more than 4 billion bytes of memory, which sounded like a lot at the time and was probably plenty for anyone who would ever use this language.
5. It lets you get machine language-like efficiency without having to program in machine language. You could write self-modifying code if you wanted to, but you didn’t have to; you could write Fortran or LISP or Cobol instead and let the compiler figure out how to make it fast enough.
Though I have been programming for a long time, I still have much to learn. As mentioned before, the best way to learn programming is to write programs. In this section, I will start writing small programs in various languages to explore their features and differences.
I was introduced to C by my first supervisor at IBM. It is a powerful language, but is quite low-level and hence hard to use. It is worth learning C as a stepping stone to C++ (and Objective C), but you should try not to write any more code than necessary in C or C++.
Java was developed at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s and rapidly became popular as an alternative to C++ for writing client-side applications (applets). Java has since become more widely used for general software development. The most common version of Java is the one with which Google’s Android operating system (now the most common smartphone OS) is programmed.
Python is a very different language from Java (and C++). Python emphasizes readability and simplicity over efficiency or control over software components. Python can be used for anything from scripting web servers through analyzing data to building complex machine learning systems.
The best way to learn these languages is by doing example problems: trying things out
In the code I had written, I was using a variable that got declared in another file. That variable was not being set until after my code ran. So by separating out the first part of the code into its own function, it allowed the variable to get set before my code ran.
The second reason is a bit more complex, but also easier to understand. In JavaScript (and other languages), when you declare a variable, you have to specify where that variable will live. There are 3 places for your variables to live: Global Scope, Function Scope, and Block Scope. When you don’t specify where that variable lives, it will live in the global scope.
In this case, I was declaring that variable in an if statement within a loop. Now think about what happens when we execute this code: If the counter equals 0, then we create the new varible with a value of 0. Then our counter increments (to 1) and we go back through the loop again. This time we hit i==1 and since i is no longer equal to 0, we skip over creating that new variable…but if i had been equal to 0 again on that second iteration, it would have created another varible with the same name!
So then we increment