Jeni's Musings

I recently filled in a questionnaire that asked about the use of robots in teaching programming. (You can win a robot!) Some of the questions seemed to be particularly about attracting women into the field; I guess the thinking is that programming something that does something in the real world is more engaging (particularly for women?) than doing artificial exercises in linked list manipulation. Or something.

I like programming robots as much as the next geek, and am the proud owner of two regular Lego Mindstorms kits as well as a less complex, but more evil, Dark Side Developers Kit. Thinking around this, it struck me that there are two classes of projects you can do with robots:

• a directive program, where you tell the robot exactly what to do (go forward for 5 seconds, turn, forward for 2 seconds etc.)
• a facilitative program, where you define the feedback between sensors and motors, then just let the robot go

Copy-and-paste coding drives me crazy. Here’s some Javascript that I was passed today that illustrates the problem:

if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("safari") >= 0) {
  if (pageSize > 1000000) {
    hideLink();
  }
} else if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("opera") >= 0) {
  if (pageSize > 1000000) {
    hideLink();
  }
} else if (navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf("firefox") >= 0) {
  if (pageSize > 1000000) {
    hideLink();
  }