Programming Languages
Scratch is a a relatively easy high-level block-based visual programming language. Having to code a game for the first time in Scratch was a challenge on its own. Having completed an algorithms and Java course 8 years ago during my first college experience helped a lot. I decided to create a game inspired by a Miniclip.com game that I always played Bubble Trouble. The game consists in a character that shoots arrows to pop bubbles that fall from up top to score points but must avoid them in order to keep playing otherwise gets eliminated. With the time I had, I decided to create ‘Popping balloons’ as a simple game consisting in a backdrop (background in Scratch language) and 3 sprites, the magician, the arrows and the balloons.
First step of planning was done, now I had to watch tutorials on different commands and functions that I could utilize to make my game at least playable.
I had to explore the motion functions, and make the magician move on a x-axis if buttons were pressed, creating clones of arrows that would start from the position of the magician and finally the biggest chunk of code that I struggled with were the balloons that were falling from the sky.
I had to repeat running the ‘if – then’ and the ‘repeat until’ functions several times. Since the block had many overlapping each other, my main struggle was either putting them inside or outside each other. It was after several testing that I got it right and the game was functioning as it should.
From this exercise I understood that the logic and functions play as great of a deal as semantics. In the Scratch there isn’t a possibility of making a semantic error, as the blocks of functions are already written, and you would have to drag and drop. The logic and the algorithm that had to be completed was critical in this case. Although participating in textbook activities exploring the machine language, assembly language and Python was also very interesting, creating this game in Scratch was a totally different experience. In Scratch I could test every part of your script as I was writing it, changing the variables and still not make a mistake, in Python, machine language or assembly language if I didn’t insert a space right the whole script would be wrong. The difference between these programming languages is the level of efficiency. On high-level languages like Python the programmer can write efficient code in the fewest number of lines. Assembly language Is a low-level programming language that is designed to communicate directly with the hardware of the computer, where it’s being simplified even more to machine language. The easiest language I found to use was Scratch, because there was only logic involved to write a block, while on Python or Assembly language semantics play a major role.
The machine language is used by the CPU and its long sequences of 0’s and 1’s. This is the only language a computer can understand. The assembly language is used primarily to implement compilers for high level languages to be translated to machine language. Since programmers do not write directly in machine language, they use assembly language for certain hardware commands. The best scenario when Python or other high-level language are used is to develop websites or software with complex commands.
Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the programming world. Python code is powerful and can be written and read easily. Python has millions of users and it’s top 10 most used programming language in the world, and it works unchanged between all the different operating systems. Simplicity is one of the main features of Python programming language making it approachable as a first one to learn.
Comments
Post a Comment