Programming Languages
For our assignment this week, we were tasked with creating our own program on Scratch. My experience with Scratch involved much trial and error. I tested just about every block to learn what action it related to and how it ran. For my program, there was a significant amount of trial and error. I always found that my best process of learning is by being hands-on.
My experience with Scratch was mildly frustrating. Since I don’t have much experience with the program, I was not familiar with where some of the actions that I wanted to perform were located. This lead me to test many of the blocks, along with the trial and error portion of my learning process. Due to all of the different backdrops and sprites that were available to use, I was overwhelmed at first. We had all the options, but it was difficult to find out what I wanted to animate. I found it easiest to select the backdrop and sprite and work off that rather than picking a scenario and trying to make that work.
I overcame many of my difficulties by plugging and playing around with different blocks. I would add one or two blocks to the sequence and see how those ran. I cannot stress enough the trial and especially error that went into my animation. I could have spent an entire day playing around with the program and still needed more time.
In Scratch, you can visually see if there are any breaks or dead ends in your program once you run it. On the other hand, when we were using the Python program from our course text, if there were any hiccups or incorrect code, it wouldn’t tell you where or what it was. It was left up to you to figure it out on your own. Scratch would be a good first programming language to introduce to someone just beginning their journey into programming, whereas Python would be a little more advanced.
I believe each person who uses a programming language has their preference depending on what they are comfortable with and what task they are trying to accomplish. I believe that for most people, Python is the most popular because of how short the lines of code can be and how easy it is for them to just plug in the variables and run.
Each programming language has its own pros and cons based on who you ask and what it's being used for. The most popular language may not be the favorite for a particular programmer. There is no wrong or right when using a language, as each language has its best attributes.
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