

Ask HN: Teaching others to code - 3dFlatLander

I have a handful of non-techy friends who have said they'd really enjoy learning to write code. Every one of these guys/gals runs windows as their primary OS, so I usually send them to the "try ruby in your browser" page and run through the tutorials with them.<p>With _why's disappearance, I've been unable to find a suitable replacement for that awesome application.<p>Can anyone recommend something similar? And while I'm at it, what resources have you all found helpful for those starting out?
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nostrademons
JavaScript is often a fairly good replacement. You can try it in your browser
anyway, and you can do fairly impressive stuff with fairly little effort. It's
pretty trivial to put together an HTML page that grabs JQuery off the AJAX
libraries API and has a text field and submit button that evals the code and
executes it immediately on the page.

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petercooper
Okay, it's nowhere near as immediate or as cool as Try Ruby, but.. I answered
the question by writing a book, Beginning Ruby -
[http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional-
Sec...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional-
Second/dp/1430223634/) ( _not_ an affiliate link). Ah well, I had to try!

I sense, though, your question is looking for something more immediate to get
over the "why bother?" hump with people who claim to want to do something but
if it requires more than an ounce of effort could give up easily. In which
case.. I'd recommend Microsoft's Small Basic: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx>

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3pt14159
Get a linode slice and tell them to download putty. I made the switch to linux
after a LONG time of just programming on windows (VBA activated excel sheets,
more complicated than it sounds) and that is how I did it. I now program in
Ubuntu, but when you are first starting out typing "ruby helloworld.rb" in
putty is not too daunting.

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uninverted
<http://utilitymill.com/utility/MetaUtility> Just about the same thing for
Python. It would probably be trivial to write another one like _why's with
Rails, though

