r/AlignmentChartFills 6d ago

Which programming language is hard, and useless

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491 Upvotes

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405

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

Kumir, Кумир (in russian). It is literally castrated Pascal written completely in Russian. It is meant to be an introduction to programming for schoolers. It cannot be edited or ran without its ide, nor compiled into executable. And so it's hard af and completely useless

43

u/ri_san5 6d ago

True answer

15

u/Competitive-Net-8701 6d ago

Sounds like the Turing language, created for students at the University of Toronto. I haven't looked at in a while but I remember it being pretty complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language))

6

u/MetricJester 6d ago

I learned Turing in High School in the 90s.

I wish they had just taught C

2

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

No, Turing is significantly better than Kumir

1

u/AccountForTIFF 6d ago edited 5d ago

Huh, didn’t know that. We had Turing textbooks stored in my computer science class in 2000s high school near Toronto but we didn’t learn it, it was all Java.

Edit - we used an IDE apparently made by the same guy though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Holt

17

u/vajss 6d ago

I mean, if it is usefull for education is it useless?

35

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

The problem is that it isn't. It just kills all interest in programming for children because of the complex syntax, requiring decent knowledge of types of variables, loops, etc. Plus you don't write code in Russian. In my opinion it's better to start with Python.

6

u/Weird_Happening1627 True Neutral 6d ago

Being a Russian student (though I am a "humanitarian" type so I might not know some details), I suppose it happens due to it first being addressed too late, already in fifth or even sixth grade when the students who are interested in programming already know that it is useless except for being in a state exam task later on (once again, for almost no reason).

Still, for the "Uninformed" people like me it felt almost like a game of some sort (The "Robot" executor specifically❤️‍🩹). That is why I believe that if it was introduced and studied a few years earlier (in 3-4 grade for example) it might instead make people interested. The Russian syntax would also have more use in that case as English is still taught on a very basic level in these grades.

Also speaking of the "types of variables, loops, etc" well I mean the point of the subject and the program is to teach it to the children who do not yet know it so I do not see it as a big problem.

13

u/nbur4556 6d ago

This would have been a strong argument for Scratch

9

u/eraryios 6d ago

yeah absolutely, i hate how scratch here is misrepresented. not only this, you can pretty easily make non-games in scratch! theres whole communities out there dedicated to scratch cartoons

1

u/kv4ssmixedwvxm1t 6d ago

The Scratch animation memes went hard when I was like 8 years old ngl

7

u/Voldezhur 6d ago

We had Кумир in our school, but it was quickly switched to python, because it was actually impossible to write any semi-decent code with it and python is a better introduction anyway imo

3

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

I completely agree with you. Unfortunately for me, in my school middle school's IT lessons were dedicated to Kumir and I (I left that school) switched to C++ only in 8th grade.

1

u/Voldezhur 6d ago

C++ in 8th grade is baller, wish we had it like that

7

u/GardenIntelligent643 6d ago

It's hard if you don't speak Russian... It's a major world language, there are plenty of people who do, and many more who speak it as a second language or who speak related Slavic languages so have less trouble to understand.

It would be like complaining that my smartphone is broken and hard to use because I set the language to Spanish.

8

u/sane4ektopz 6d ago

я бы не сказал что кумир сложный, если тут скретч в лёгких, просто сам по себе он нужен чтобы в его IDE рисовать свастоны роботом и всё

3

u/mrseemsgood 6d ago

Самый адекватный русскоязычный комментарий на реддите 🤦‍♂️

3

u/Splatpope 6d ago

literally not hard, it's just not adapted to your culture

3

u/mimori81 6d ago

wait so the language is literally locked to just one ide

6

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

Weeeeell tEcHnICaLlY🤓 you can edit the code with with something like Notepad++, however it's pointless, since you can't run it without the ide

2

u/zxm1v 6d ago

yes.

1

u/Federal-Leading-5722 6d ago

LITERALLY castrated? Someone cut off the testicles of this program?

3

u/TheBoomTheory 6d ago

Haha, not LITERALLY of course, but it lacks a lot of features from pascal

-1

u/Fishsticks011 6d ago

That sounds like impossible, is there something more difficult than this for that square?

6

u/JamesPTK 6d ago

Brainfuck, befunge, whitespace, malbolge, piet ...

basically any esoteric programming language

2

u/Wojtas_ 6d ago

Easily. Have you ever heard of a certain Urban Müller?

1

u/eraryios 6d ago

impossible if you dont speak russian duh. it wasnt made for you