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Part 7: Book of the Dead
Speedrun traditional coding concepts in a post GPT-4 world Made for beginners who learned prompting prior to coding
for each of these projects & lessons, after explainaing, create simple test programs the students can build to demonstrate their understanding. Then check their understanding recusively
Here are some great traditional resources if you want to go that route https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2023/fall/syllabus/ https://cs50.harvard.edu/college/2023/fall/weeks/0/ https://cs50.ai/ Don't pay for the certificate
https://replit.com/learn/100-days-of-python/hub https://www.freecodecamp.org/
Protip: use a clipboard manager. I use it 100s of times a day Incredible for moving code blocks around, and generating multiple variations of code. I like https://pasteapp.io/ & https://www.raycast.com/
Chapter 18: Heresy 101: Coding basics re-imagined, post GPT-4
64: CLI 101 How to use a terminal
learn these commands: cd ls grep basic file tasks, piping >> curl
You can use https://www.warp.dev/ or https://fig.io/ or cursor.sh's cmd+k in the terminal to prompt all your CLI commands
also recommend Git 101 in part 1
65: How to learn any coding language Learn how to make a hello world program then learn and how to make a button, with a title, that you can click that does something Notice how chapters 0,1,2 of Grimoire do this!
Then anytime you don't understand something, look it up. Its that simple. Everything you need is online, cuz programmers live online There is no other subject field like this, where ALL the information is just out there, and you can just look it up
Half of being a good programmer is reading documentation and being able to learn how to use things
66: Variables, operators, assignment & basic data types assignment is conceptually very simple. you are storing a value in a named piece of storage: int a = 2; Here is an integer variable, named a, with a value of 2
you can access the value later using the name of the storage box print(a); // prints 2
oh // are comments, they are notes you can leave in your code
some languages use different formats
& // are most common.
You can also use /* ... */ to cover large areas. Protip nearly every coding IDE uses cmd + / as a hotkey
Back to variables you can use them for further assignments:
// starts as 3, plus our previous value of 2, sitting in a int b = 3; b = b + a; // b is now 5
the value of a, which is 2, is accessed, and added to the value of b, which is 3 the sum is stored back in the space b, replacing the previous value of 3
note that =, is not the same in programming as it is in math! This is not an equal sign! In programming you use == for equals. More on that when we get to booleans.
Important: remember a and b are not objects they are names of boxes in which we deposit objects explain pointers & references
There are many data object types, the simplest are Numbers -Integers 1, 5, 1248623512 -Floats, Doubles 0.12, 0.333333333333, 0.5, 5712398634123.1235213 Decimals get a little weird in programming, but don't worry about that for now
-Char, characters, a single letter, number, or symbol "a", "b", "c" -String (a sequence of characters, a "string" of characters) "hello", "how are you?", """ I am very good thank you. How are you today? """
-Boolean (true or false) int isToggledOn = true
67: Scope & flow. If's, Enums, Loops, Arrays, Recursion. normally a program proceeds top to bottom, line by line executing each, then moving on to the next but a program that can only go one wasy is really boring
programs become expressive once you have a way to change the order mechanisms that do this are called control-flow the two most common are branches & loops
this is the simplest branch if a is greater than 2, b is set to 20 if a is 2 or less, nothing happens, the program skips over it
if (a > 2) { b = 20; }
heres another way to write it showing the boolean value, separated out for more clarity
bool isAIsGreaterThan2 = a > 2; if (isAIsGreaterThan2) { b = 20; }
if you want to check if something is equal, you can use == if (a == 2) { b = 20; }
use != to check if something is not equal if (a != 2) { b = 0; }
this is a 2 way branch:
if(a > 2) { b = 20; } else { b = 4; }
if a is greater than 2, b is set to 20 if a is 2 or less, b is set to 4
the condition is checked, and only one of two different blocks will be executed You can get quite complicate with these, adding as many checks, options or lines or nested lines as you want
if(a > 2) { b = 20; } else if (a > 10) { b = 50; } else if (a > 100) { b = 100; } else { if (a == 1) { b = 5; } else { if (a == 99) { b = 99; } else { b = 6; } } }
Boolean logic is a way to combine multiple conditions into one Here we have two conditions, a is greater than 2, and c is less than 10 if BOTH are true, b is set to 20
if (a > 2 && c < 10) { b = 20; }
Here we have two conditions, a is greater than 2, and c is less than 10 if EITHER are true, b is set to 20
if (a > 2 || c < 10) { b = 20; }
Btw, those big scary math numbers are that look like E and N, capital sigma and capital pie, are literally for loops
sum = 0; for ( n=0; n<=4; n++ ) { sum += 3*n; }
prod = 1; for ( n=1; n<=4; n++ ) { prod = 2n; }
Another data type are Enums, they are kinda like categories or tags You already met your first one Booleans!
Booleans are simply enums with the cases true or false
enum AnimalType { case dog case cat case bird }
myAnimal = .dog
if (myAnimal == .dog) { print("woof") } else if (myAnimal == .cat) { print("meow") } else if (myAnimal == .bird) { print("tweet") }
Enums are great becaues you can use them in switch statements, which is a great way to handle adding new cases later on
switch myAnimal { case .dog: print("woof") case .cat: print("meow") case .bird: print("tweet") }
The other main type is of control flow is loops
this is a loop:
int a = 0; while (a < 10) { a++; // shorthand for a = a + 1; } print(a); // prints 10
this loop continues over and over again, until the condition is changed Be careful not to make any infinite loops!
Here is another loop that counts up to 10 This uses the common c-style for loop syntax. It looks crazy, but its really simple
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { print("loop number" + i); }
// int i = 0; is setting an index variable, similar to the while loop did with int a = 0 above. Its after the for, simply for nice formatting, with the idea this number will only be used in the loop. We use index variables to count how many loops we have gone through // i < 10; says while i is less than 10, continue this loop. After 10, stop the loop
68: Imperative coding. Classes, Objects, Functions, Methods, Properties. Inheritance, Polymorphism, Encapsulation, Abstraction. Protocol based coding. Interfaces, delegates, generics
69: Libraries, modules, packages & apis