Kenneth C. Cheung. TinyProjector, Prototypes. Infosyncratic.nl. Affective Computing. Dear Everyone Teaching Programming: You're Doing It Wrong. Teaching coding is hot.
Codecademy famously signed up New York’s mayor as a user (and recently roped in $10m of venture capital), and the popular online-teaching concern Khan Academy just launched a suite of programming lessons. Backlash followed: career programmers have scoffed at the idea of “coding as literacy,” while an academic study claimed that some people can code, and others simply can’t. New Programming Language Makes Coding Social Apps Easier. While it takes just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks to post a tweet on Twitter or “friend” someone on Facebook, it may require thousands of lines of code to accomplish the task.
Dog, a new programming language, could make it easier and more intuitive to write all sorts of social applications—anything from peer-to-peer question-and-answer sites to online dating. And because Dog incorporates natural language, this may make it easier for newbies to learn to code, too. MIT Media Lab professor Sep Kamvar, who developed Dog with the help of some graduate students, hopes to release the language in a private beta version in the next few months, and offer a public release of it in the spring. Dog emerged from Kamvar’s frustration with existing programming languages, such as Java, which he felt were needlessly difficult to use to write code governing social interactions. “I had to write code at a lower level of abstraction than I had to think about the interactions,” he says.