

Ask HN: How would you get a friend started on programming - vishnupr

A close friend of mine recently came to me to teach him programming. He had absolute 0 background knowledge in the subject. Otherwise, he's a smart guy with a genius keen interest to learn.<p>I started teaching him some simple Objective C syntax. After doing some if &#38; while demos, I taught him the concept of OOP and made a very simple app that relies heavily on OOP with him. By now, I could clearly tell that the guy was totally confused and didn't really understand the concepts of OOP. A few more attempts and 2 hours later, we both gave up.<p>How would you have done it?
What resources would you have used?
What language would you teach a first-timer?<p>Or a different question would be: How did you yourself get started on programming?
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sirwitti
i think, you can´t do everything all at once. since programming is quite
abstract, perhaps it would be enough to do some basic stuff like variables,
ifs and basic output.

most important (to me): always show the results, like run the program.
otherwise people have no clue what all those strange lines mean and do. martin

