• TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’ve seen someone code that way. Not since high school, but that’s a way that some people think coding works when they start out writing code.

    This person was trying to write a game in (trigger warning: nostalgia) QBasic and had it drawing kindof a Pacman kind of character. And in pseudocode basically what he was doing was:

    // Draw character with mouth open at (100, 100)
    moveCursorTo(100, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(116, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(108, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(116, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(100, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(100, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    // Draw character with mouth closed at (101, 100)
    moveCursorTo(101, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(109, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(117, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(109, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(101, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(101, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    // Draw character with mouth open at (102, 100)
    moveCursorTo(102, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(118, 100)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(110, 108)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(118, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(110, 116)
    drawLineFromCursorAndMoveCursor(102, 100)
    
    // Wait for half a second.
    sleepSeconds(0.5)
    
    ...
    

    He hadn’t gotten to the point of working in user controls. (Like “change direction to ‘up’ when user presses the ‘up’ key” or whatever.) And understandably had no idea how that would work if/when he got that far.