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Very nicely written, and congrats on doing such a deep dive on this kind of topic. These days 17 year olds can get away with "programming" by gluing things they don't understand, but I think they'll eventually hit a ceiling. So what you're doing is super valuable, not for yourself, but for everyone else who will learn from your materials. Well done :) EDIT: now go write an emulator if you haven't already, it's a ton…
17 to 21-ish is probably my least gluey era of programming. I wrote an MVC framework from scratch, built my own interpreter, my own compiler, accidentally tried to reinvent machine learning and NLP from scratch, all sorts of cool and wonderful things.
Then I discovered money and prior art. Wow you can build things so much faster if you let others tell you “here, just use this”! And frameworks!! Omg jquery makes life so much easier this is amazing.
Many years later now, the stuff that used to count as “just gluing things together” is now considered “super low level advanced stuff”. We’ve built new abstractions on top of those abstractions.
The stuff beginners “can get away with” now, that’s the next generation’s super low level here be dragons stuff. Programming is great that way.
> There aren't many comprehensive systems resources if you aren't going to college, so I had to sift through tons of different sources of varying quality and sometimes conflicting information.
The absolutely best resource you will find is Charles Petzold's Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. The 2nd edition was just released.
What's your advice on how to teach programming to my kid? Curious to hear what another young person thinks. Kid is 11, has all the basics, knows how to type, knows how to open a terminal. What things did you think were important to learn, what kinds of things motivated you most? What did you do when you got stuck?
If they can create/combine algorithms to solve a problem... that's most of programming.
I'd start with the "robot" problem: have them write a set of steps to complete a simple task, and then have them (or better, someone else) go through the steps precisely (no cheating and assuming they meant something they didn't write!). Then iterate and add/remove steps until the task is actually doable. (Disclaimer: idea cribbed from someone else)
That gets them to grok the "everything needs to be in a program, and a program is only everything that's in it" idea.
The traveling salesman problem (recast in whatever form would be most interesting to the kids) and graph theory problems are also especially visual and explorable.
Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
That said, the tone of my reply to OP would have been different if hadn't known their age. Or more likely I would have thought to myself "so you understand CPUs, cool" and moved on.
Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
Yes, that's the point. They're 17, so my expectations are lower.
I am impressed a 17 year old wrote this website.
Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself. I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Appare…
Meta point: I'm curious of people's thoughts when OPs in general post "I'm N years old..." or "I'm a blind programmer who..." before posting something unrelated to their life situation. Personally I think this falls into the "girls do not exist on the internet" rule of thumb. No reason to state that you're a girl (or 12 years old or whatever) other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.…
It always seems like the intent is for internet strangers to pat you on the back and tell you how special/precocious you are.