Date: July 24
Today is meant as a fun “zoom out” day. We get so easily bogged down in the specifics of our class or of ISL/ASL…that we quickly lose sight of the beauty of programming. In the videos today, I focus on the idea of “programming languages”–what they look like, which ones are (have been) popular, how to choose between them, and how to learn them. Finally, we’ll take a look at three programming languages that look absolutely NOTHING like ISL/ASL:
- Bifrost (part of the Maya rendering software) which is a programming language for procedural graphics generation; link to Bifrost
- Max (MSP) which is a programming language meant for audio synthesis and manipulation; link to Max
- NetLogo which is an IDE and language meant to allow for exploration of complex systems through agent-based modeling; link to example used in the video
Programming languages are diverse in their ways of representation and expression, but the thing they share is the ability to help us concretize what’s in our heads in a way the computer understands. This communication between us and the computer is pretty incredible and by forcing ourselves to analyze how we think about things it changes the way we understand what we understand (meta…I know).
In-Class Resources
| Link | Title | Type | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video 1 | Lecture 21.1 - Programming Languages | pre-recorded | 886.0 |
| Video 2 | Lecture 21.2 - Domain Specific Languages (Bifrost) | pre-recorded | 170.0 |
| Video 3 | Lecture 21.3 - Max Demo 1 | pre-recorded | 184.0 |
| Video 4 | Lecture 21.4 - Max Demo 2 | pre-recorded | 204.0 |
| Video 5 | Lecture 21.5 - NetLogo | pre-recorded | 555.0 |
| Video 6 | Lecture 21.6 - Bye for Now | pre-recorded | 304.0 |
Mini-Quiz 21: Programming Languages
To take the mini-quiz associated with this lecture's content, you can use this link or find the quiz under the Quizzes page on Canvas.