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Comment by elviejo79 | Hacker News Reader

This goes to prove that java is a pretty bad language to teach pogramming.

in logo this is how you draw a square forward 100 Right 90 Forward 100 Right 90 Forward 100 Right 90 Forward 100 Right 90

Then in the second lesson you introduce loops repeat 4 Forward 100 Right 90 End

then you ask kids to draw hexagons octagons etc. and they will never forget what a for loop does.

Edit changed repeat 8 to repeat 4. Thank you.

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You could do that in Java if you just imported a turtle graphics library. A quick search brings up one such library, http://www.bfoit.org/itp/JavaTurtleGraphics.html. I agree that Java is a hard language to learn with, but its faults are not related to being unable to use turtle graphics as examples.

No, you couldn't. Did you look at that link? You have to wrap all this OO ceremony around it.

I don't think it's optimal to make someone type

  class Cross extends TurtleGraphicsWindow { public void myTurtleCmds() ...

at the start of every program when they don't yet have the background to understand what a single one of those words are for. It instills a habit of doing crazy shit mindlessly to try to satisfy the mysterious computer.

I remember learning Java for the first time. I literally thought of "public static void main(String[] args)" as an incantation I just had to know. It took some practice to memorize it. It took far longer to actually learn what it meant.

My point is that there are good tools to learn programming. I think that there are languages in which difficult concepts befome easier to explain. logo being the prime example of such a teaching language.

Repeat 4 (right?)

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