Context: I went through high school believing that I'd need to have 2 years of high school foreign language, but where I went, the requirement was one year of hich school "computing", which I didn't have. So I took a course on "programming", which was taught in BASIC.
There was a certain amount of "just make a thing, we'll judge it later", and I played roll-playing games, so my "make a thing" was a program to print out random numbers between one and six (a common die to roll), and then I made another that would do between one and eight.
I GOTOd to a high-number block, ifd to determine if it was d6 or d8, did the random thing, and jumped back to print.
And I found that computers are highly deterministic machines and that rand is not as random as you want, by running it a second time and getting the same page of "random" numbers.
So, the things I figured out from that process are:
seed your randomness, even if it's for toy values of randomness
functions and subroutines are an important thing for your language to have, and if you don't have them, you will try to re-implement them, poorly
that was enough of all that
But this is what I knew by Jan 1, 1989.
The thing I (today) wish I (then) knew about programming that these stupid roadblocks were known issues at that time, and that the languages I would use as a professional will have worked these dumb things, discovered a wholelotmore dumb, and worked out that.
And that the process of fixing and improving is very fun.
(That's another off-by-one error, isn't it?)
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Context: I went through high school believing that I'd need to have 2 years of high school foreign language, but where I went, the requirement was one year of hich school "computing", which I didn't have. So I took a course on "programming", which was taught in BASIC.
There was a certain amount of "just make a thing, we'll judge it later", and I played roll-playing games, so my "make a thing" was a program to print out random numbers between one and six (a common die to roll), and then I made another that would do between one and eight.
I
GOTOd to a high-number block,ifd to determine if it was d6 or d8, did the random thing, and jumped back to print.And I found that computers are highly deterministic machines and that
randis not as random as you want, by running it a second time and getting the same page of "random" numbers.So, the things I figured out from that process are:
seed your randomness, even if it's for toy values of randomness
functions and subroutines are an important thing for your language to have, and if you don't have them, you will try to re-implement them, poorly
that was enough of all that
But this is what I knew by Jan 1, 1989.
The thing I (today) wish I (then) knew about programming that these stupid roadblocks were known issues at that time, and that the languages I would use as a professional will have worked these dumb things, discovered a whole lot more dumb, and worked out that.
And that the process of fixing and improving is very fun.
(That's another off-by-one error, isn't it?)