I highly recommend Processing and The Coding Train [0]. The visual feedback is both engaging and illuminating to folks who have no prior experience with procedures or spreadsheets.
Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#22I've been working on https:/boot.dev in my spare time, trying to go full-time on it soon.
Wont't say it's the best but I've been trying to fix a lot of things I don't like about existing content/platforms.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#23so you should go te read about anything in programming also you should ask any question in your mind
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#24If he was younger, I would have recommended scratch. I recommended that to my then 11-year old cousin and he is now an engineering undergrad student.
At your son's age, there are plenty of how to program python courses using udemy and the like that show to build progressively harder apps for a complete beginner. From there, he could probably try to do one of those google certificate courses on android development or the like.
I remember having to check out BASIC programming books from the library as a kid to learn. These days, people have made fortunes on creating videos on how to program.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#25I usually recommend everyone who wants to learn programming:
- to write some games,
- or alternative to write some tools to be used for themselves to automate or simplify some of their tasks.
Writing games can be so much fun, and is incredibly deep such that you can pretty much touch upon all topics of programming, networking, computer science, algorithms and data structures, artificial intelligence, 3D graphics, GPU programming, low level programming, multi threading, etc. But also, you can start very shallowly and simply.
Writing tools gives you the feeling how useful and productive this can be.
What languages to use depends a bit on taste, background knowledge, and how steep the learning curve can be. I think Python is a good general purpose starting language.
Also, in any case, you should start actively coding right away. I know people who wanted to learn programming but just kept reading books and watching tutorial videos all the time while not really trying it out, and in the end they obviously did never really learn it. You need to have projects, or just random playgrounds. Also, don't start with a big project right away. Do many small projects. Play around.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#26Swift Playgrounds is pretty cool.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#27I will tag along here - with some details on my experience as well as looking for better answers.
Things like Scratch, Python+Pygames etc make the initial hello-world style apps too easy and then there is a gigantic learning curve for anything better. It is very hard to keep the motivation going.
We tried codehs.com . Kids spend an excruciating amount of time trying to make the print statement's literal output match with whatever the code-checker is expecting. It is frustrating even for me to try to debug their code. I feel any kid who is learning coding without an IDE such as VsCode will get discouraged from this field.
I am just about to start a session for 8th grade graduates to introduce them to 'advent of code'. At least here, the right answer is just a number. No more worrying about the quote character being in unicode or text.
The one that got real interest from my students was a world-puzzle solver - to cheat the phone game "LetterPress" (free on iPhone and Android). They finally understood how a bot (official bot that you play against) could be so smart.
I am still on the lookout for such good examples that they can actually use in real life.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#28The thing about BASIC was that you could just do something. You could try things easily and quickly. You could fiddle with things.
Of current environments, Python may come the closest. (Other environments have a REPL, which is a great environment, but "REPL + harsher learning curve" is not what you're looking for.)
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#29As many others have pointed out, something relevant like games is a good starting point.
On your main question about how to make the (now painful) dev environment setup easier I have some suggestions:
1. Just use javascript
2. Just use python/pygames (yes it has to be installed)
3. Just use a hosted environment (like replit.com)
4. Just use swift if you are a mac user
Re: Ask HN: It's 2022. Where should I direct the youths to learn about programming?
#30I'm not a programmer. I tried Python many times, but honestly the best time I had was in an algorithms class that used C.