

Want to learn to program? Here's your first lesson - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-first-lesson-in-programming.html

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rosenjon
I think it's great you're helping out people who want to learn with posts like
this.

A couple critiques: When I was first learning, I was desperate for Hello World
code I could paste and run. As basic as this tutorial is, sometimes even a
little abstraction makes it hard for newbies to grasp. For example, why not
make the doWhatever function do something, so they can run the code and see
how it works?

Same with assignment vs eval... demonstrate it in a fully functioning piece of
code they can copy, paste and hack themselves.

Analogies to noble gases aren't the best... since non science people may not
even remember what that is. Also, a can easily be changed, so I'm not sure the
analogy even holds.

Nice post overall. I think Hacker news should have a way to easily find all
articles like this.

