A more advanced "Hello, World"?
5 26 Jun 2015 17:12 by u/spiraldancing
So, "Hello, World" is the tried-and-true first program written by new programmers, and old programmers starting a new language.
I'm looking for suggestions on a more advanced default program/project, that one can write fairly quickly (10-60 minutes or so), that is likely to make use of a wide variety of a language's features, and will allow for decent comparison/contrast of of features between languages.
For instance, I will sometimes write a tic-tac-toe game, or a word/letter frequency analyzer, in a new language as I start learning it, to get a hands-on feel for the differences from languages I already know. So, maybe I already answered my own question, but I'd like to hear what other people think might make good projects for this.
7 comments
2 u/mikwaheeri 26 Jun 2015 17:39
One simple idea that I like is writing a little program to open commonly used files instead of manually navigating and double clicking. It touches on basic GUI use (creating a window & some buttons) as well as using built-in OS operations. This obviously doesn't cover a very wide range of features, but still could prove somewhat useful if expanded upon.
1 u/captbrogers 26 Jun 2015 22:42
It's a great question but there is a caveat to it: what platform are you aiming at?
Which of the following applies:
Here are my two credits worth of thoughts on each.
On the desktop I'd go for a calculator. It can be as simple as basic arithmetic to more advanced features like graphing output on a formula using a GUI library.
A website, either desktop or mobile, do a blog. Not just any blog, but one written using object-oriented code. Do role-based permissions, repository patterns, events, JSON (or XML) API, handling uploads, etc. Can be done with or without a framework.
Mobile apps I'm not really well versed on a concept that would be great to cover basics of each. For that, someone else will have to chime in.
1 u/codioBunny 27 Jun 2015 05:33
Similar to tic-tac-toe, writing Blackjack is also a good one. You can make it as simple or complex as you like: start off with just text-based and then create a UI for it.
0 u/spiraldancing [OP] 27 Jun 2015 15:16
Found it. Here's what I was looking for ... rosetta code.
0 u/wunderlust 27 Jun 2015 19:13
Writing a basic infix to postfix converter, or a small calculator. A lot of string manipulation, function modularity, file I/O, basic dictionary/array data structures.
0 u/TelescopiumHerscheli 29 Jun 2015 07:01
I usually do two things after "Hello, World". First, I check that I can perform simple mathematical operations. Second, I check that I can open files, read from them and write to them.
0 u/kuda 29 Jun 2015 19:32
I usually write a database-backed and/or file system backed to-do list application to learn a new language. Usually, 60 minutes is more than enough. If there's plenty of time, also add user login feature, so there will be different list for different user.