Programming Languages

Programming Languages

In this assignment, we explored and built a program using Scratch. “Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations.” (mit.edu, n.d.). I found it very organized from my experience using Scratch for the first time. This is my first attempt at creating a program using a visual interface. I found it very easy to use and learn. There are endless possibilities for what to create. There are many options for what your Sprite can do. Here is the link to my Scratch program. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/799110578/ 

I found some difficulties in programming the Sprite, from making it look like it is walking across the stage and jumping. I had to experiment with different variables to make them walk in a different direction and face the correct direction. I kept on making the mistake of the Sprite disappearing off of the stage. I was able to overcome this by changing the variables. There were a lot of trials and errors. The program looks easy, but many blocks are in the background. 

Before starting the Scratch programming language, I had no experience with creating any type of programming. I am glad it’s not as difficult as the machine language used in the early days. Early programmers entered a program into a computer as 0's and 1's by manually connecting wires or configuring switches. (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). Scratch is a great starting point for learning programming for beginners. I can see how children can become very interested in creating their games, art, and animations. I learned that Scratch differs from the programming exercises in chapter 2. I did not have to learn 1s and 0s for the assembly language or write scripts like we had to do in Python. 

The difference between programming languages is the types of uses them. The languages we investigated can be divided into 3 groups: The script group of Perl and Python; the semi-compiled group of Java and C#; and the compiled group of C and C++. (Mathieu& Gillings, 2008). For example, Python is commonly used with data science, and Java is used to create enterprise-type applications. Java script is used when creating web content. I believe Java script would be the easiest to use. It is cross-platform, making it more interactive for people visiting websites. I think C++ would be used for games. I know a lot of popular games are written in C++. Some examples of games written in C++ are World of Warcraft, Doom, and King Quest, to name a few. I work with a lot of scientists. They are always asking for Python to be installed on their computers. I know that Python is highly used in the scientific community. In my previous jobs, I had to work a lot with developers. A lot of the programs they created were written in Java. It was widely used in the enterprise, and it is very robust. They are able used on multiple platforms. This type of language treats a program as a group of objects composed of data and program elements, known as attributes and methods (Coursera.org n.d.).I believe that object-oriented programming is the most popular and maybe the easiest to use. 

 

 

References:

Coursera.org (2022 November 20) 5 types of programming languages

https://www.coursera.org/articles/types-programming-language 

Fourment, M. & Gillings, M. (2008 February, 8) A comparison of common programming languages used in bioinformation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267699/ doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-9-82

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.