32 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
32 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
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The first thing that stands between you and writing your first, real,
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piece of code, is learning the skill of breaking problems down into
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acheivable little actions that a computer can do for you. Of course,
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you and the computer will also need to be speaking a common language,
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but we'll get to that topic in just a bit.
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Now breaking problems down into a number of steps may sound a new
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skill, but its actually something you do every day. Let’s look at an
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example, a simple one: say you wanted to break the activity of fishing
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down into a simple set of instructions that you could hand to a robot,
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who would do your fishing for you. Here’s our first attempt to do that,
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check it out:
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You can think of these statements as a nice recipe for fishing. Like any
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recipe, this one provides a set of steps, that when followed in order,
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will produce some result or outcome in our case, hopefully, catching
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some fish.
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Notice that most steps consists of simple instruction, like "cast line
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into pond", or "pull in the fish." But also notice that other
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instructions are a bit different because they depend on a condition,
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like “is the bobber above or below water?". Instructions might also
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direct the flow of the recipe, like "if you haven’t finished fishing,
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then cycle back to the beginning and put another worm on the hook."
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Or, how about a condition for stopping, as in “if you’re done” then go
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home.
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You’re going to find these simple statements or instructions are the
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first key to coding, in fact every App or software program you’ve ever
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used has been nothing more than a (sometimes large) set of simple
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instructions to the computer that tell it what to do.
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