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DAVID MALAN: --it familiar.
Because here in week one, what we'll begin to do is to compare initially--
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DAVID MALAN: So this is, I think, by far the greatest value
of the bridge between Scratch and C, or really whatever language
you're transitioning to after it.
The ability, in this week, to now show left hand, right hand
what Scratch looked like, some construct,
and what the equivalent construct looks like in C, I think is really powerful.
Especially when, if you were to put up, my god,
like a for-loop syntax or a few-- or like the declaration of a function,
it's just so overwhelming.
DOUG LLOYD: If you just put up in the middle of nowhere, like?
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, I think so.
And then have to be like, oh, well, don't worry about
the int, oh don't worry too much about those parentheses, oh my god,
where's the curly brace symbol on the keyboard.
I mean, there's so much distraction, and yet none of that
has anything to do with the fundamental idea of what these constructs are.
DOUG LLOYD: Even so, though, there is definitely some hand
waving that we have to do early on to--
But I agree that having it side-by-side is,
it's like, oh OK, like this concept of when green flag clicked,
which students now know as Start, apparently
that translates to int main(void).
And, yeah, you don't know what int is, you don't know what void is right now,
but we can say, like, just hold on for that for now.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, I mean the parentheses work,
because they're kind of like the white box placeholders in some of the puzzle
pieces.
And even the curly braces actually do work, the symmetry of it.
DOUG LLOYD: Sum up of the loops.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, exactly.
But the rest is a bit of a distraction otherwise.
But at least now, you know that, all right,
even if I get a little lost today, it's still just like, hello world,
on the left.
It's still just Scratch ideas.
DOUG LLOYD: Right.
And we'll say this is not the last time that they'll see us doing
something like this this semester.
DAVID MALAN: No, no.
I mean, in fact, we'll later on, use this to make the bridge from C
to Python, from C to JavaScript.
It's a nice, I think, approach no matter what the before and the after languages
are.
So long as there is a decent mapping between the two.