🦾 Weekly Topic: Most Challenging Coding Task or Concept

Arcade
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Hi everyone! We’re shaking it up a bit this week and stepping away from “favorites” questions. This week, we want to talk about the challenges that we’ve come across in our coding journeys. I think it’s important to talk about the things we find difficult because it shows that we’re not alone in our struggles. It can also be a great reminder of how much you’ve grown as a programmer!

Coding can be pretty tricky and computer science has some really complex concepts that are really hard to grasp. What is the most challenging thing you’ve had to do with code? What is the computer science concept that you struggle(d) with most? Is it something that you still find hard? Maybe the community can help! If it’s something you understand now, I encourage you to share your journey of problem solving! Let’s chat about it!

:computer: :open_book: :bulb:

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Animations and Art

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Coding

nah

Def Math I just Slam my face into my keyboard until something math related works

note for your safety: do not look at my math code

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Oh god I have so many!!!

  • Art
  • Animations
  • Anything Procedural
  • Idea Generation & Story Writing (especially mystery)
  • MUSIC (@InvalidProject HOW DO YOU DO IT??? :sob:)
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Ideas and and art.
Copy Sprite

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animations/art are the most challenging for me, but everything else comes decently easy.

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I love this! This gives me a real minute to look at my journey.
parte uno :3
I remember struggling with tilemaps, and how they worked; what it meant for these “placements” on the tiles. And oh my, when I lost my MARBLES learning about extensions!
It felt so surreal to feel a good pacing when learning makecode, and how variables were more than just things to look at when creating sprites!

My games would slowly start building; getting more complex as I would just go WAYYYY too far with any newly learned concept, but that’s what I loved a lot
the second coming!1!!1!
During my middle years, where I found myself quite adapt in makecode, it rlly didn’t end for me there- learning abt the forums, and participating in events, coder king, finding my passion for MUSIC. I’m not joking; if not for Makecode, I would have never realized my love for Music.

and I rlly felt so much faster; things would fly by as I figured out how z (depth) worked, and how I could use logic blocks, which at the time, rlly stumped me! I could feel myself getting (jimmy neutron ahh moment) SMARTER!
el Ultima (macho!!!)
even now, I learn new things. forgive me, but bc of the dent in my “brain”, I hadn’t even known abt sprite data, or function parameters! these cool little tips and tricks helped me feel like a real student, learning these cool things…

I don’t write long messages like these, I find them draining. but times like these, when I can reflect with my past on makecode, it reminds me why I love coding and not SCRATCHHCHCHFINEVNFJI-

Without a doubt, the hardest thing was sticking to makecode and not dropping it, even after learning about the difference between numbers and strings, or finding out functions, or anything at all. I love this site :>

ANYWAYS- no more ranting ^///^ also @ChimbroDaPro I don’t know how to make music. its trial and error :]

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In my opinion, the hardest parts of coding include:

  • setting up an environment that follow best practices
  • deploying a product with best practices
  • security

There are a lot of old and outdated tutorials and methods to set up, or the best way to set something up is hidden away. For example, writing a maintainable Makefile for your C++ project or setting up Eslint, TypeScript, Prettier, etc. for web development, etc. are all difficult tasks. Thankfully, this process is made easier by project templates.

MakeCode Arcade, Scratch, etc. hide these difficulties, which are great for not just new people but experienced devs as well, not needing to worry about tooling.

Also, I’m not a creative person so anything art or music or coming up with new creative ideas is difficult for me. :slight_smile:

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making the “a” button do something without my game crashing

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Finishing something :melting_face:

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Reading a book about statistical inference and trying to translate that to an extension before I forget what a statistical inference even is.

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I had a lot of trouble setting up my MakeCode websockets project, it took me a very long time to even understand what I was doing!

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Using sound effects, music, and art
Programming is what I am interested in.

  • Sound effects: It is hard to figure out which one works best
  • Music: Pretty self explanatory.
  • Art: I CAN’T DRAW so I use the most basic form of sprites: Squares
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  1. Finish a game
  2. Code very difficult mechanics
  3. FPS Problem
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Omg. It definitely has to be the not-block side of coding. I took a Object Oriented Python class, but we never went into classes and namespaces or any of that and I am just so confused :sob:
Plus the fact that it’s all really Java (I think?) under the hood (I really have no idea what I’m talking about) is really confusing.

The problem I need answering is this: is it possible, in Makecode, to have a function that returns a list of the variables defined in a namespace? I want to be able to grab all the tile names attached to myTiles (myTiles.tile1…etc)
If it’s not possible, that’s fine, I just need to know :melting_face:

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art, it’s really hard for me to do art.

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Object Orientation in Python is not as straightforward as it is in Java in my opinion. I was introduced to classes and objects in python in college, but it wasn’t until I took an OO class in Java where inheritance really clicked. I actually didn’t know that namespaces were a thing until I came to MakeCode. I’m not sure how common they are.

I’m not sure about the class that you took, but if you coded in Python, the layer underneath your code will be Python-specific, and, as far as I know, have nothing to do with Java. Most programming languages have compilers that take your more human-readable code and translate it to machine code, something your computer can understand. Because different programming languages have different syntax, they likely have different compilers under the hood.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I do not have a strong background with compilers and interpreters. There’s a lot of specificity when it comes to talking about what a programming language does behind the scenes of you writing with it, and what I just noted above is a bit vague and I might not be using the exactly correct terminology.

In terms of your question about getting the variables defined in a namespace, I’m not 100% sure. I’ve been fiddling with tilemap stuff and haven’t found anything successful. I don’t really work with tilemaps much, though… @richard, is something like this possible?

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  • setting up an environment that follow best practices
  • deploying a product with best practices

These are such good ones. It’s tricky to start a project and add tools to my environment to make development easier. It’s even difficult to onboard to projects because of the different packages and software that you might need. And the steps to set this up on your machine often differ per OS. I know there are tools that can make this easier now, but I haven’t played with them yet; they always seem a bit intimidating to me :sweat_smile:.

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Sounds like I might have a few YouTube videos about classes and namespaces to watch…

I wrote it confusingly, but I was referring to Makecode being Java under the hood, not the code in the class I took. I think I’ll just use the Java side of Makecode because it makes it easier to reference all the stuff in the Explorer.

After about 2 seconds of googling, I have come to the conclusion that it’s probably not Java under the hood. Could it be C++? Idk. They all look the same to me :person_shrugging:

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Something that took me a while to grasp was pointers in C. I feel like I still get tripped up every once in a while when dealing with things that are pass by reference rather than pass by value, but it’s definitely a concept that gets easier to understand the more you deal with it.

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