The story of computer language

최근 자바의 근황이 어떤가 해서 Java 닷컴을 들렀다. 그런데 Java와 합쳐진 다양한 프로젝트가 많이 보였다. 그중 3D 프로그래밍 환경을 제공하는 Alice라는 프로젝트가 눈길을 끈다.

아래는 Alice 홈페이지의 소개글을 발체해본다.

What is Alice?

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

http://www.alice.org/