Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?

>They (especially JS) have a lot of weird design decisions that don't translate to other languages and don't map neatly onto problem spaces.

As someone who started with JS, I feel like this is a valid point, but also ... not really a big hurdle to overcome later down the line.

It's one of those things that is really apparent when comparing languages, but I'm not sure matters as far as learning goes. No doubt someone has run into someone who can't do anything outside JS, but I'm not sure that is all that common.

I feel like if you're at all capable, it's almost no hurdle, and the benefits of being easy to start, can do some front and back end work, are pretty big.

I'm super grateful that my first exposure to programming (high school in Eastern Europe, 10+ years ago) was in C++. I don't think we even did a lot of C++ specific stuff so it was probably closer to C but using cout instead of printf. Covered things from if-statements and loops to sorting and tree-searching algorithms. It doesn't sound flashy and it somehow goes against the trend to try to make learning exciting, but it lays a really nice foundation in your learning.

I also really appreciate that you can get started playing around without making an account.

I started with BASIC programs written on my TI-86 to automate math problems; they may find that a useful way to get started, and learning a little BASIC shouldn't be much more brain-damaging than learning Javascript.

I kind of have a problem with training people to "code" rather than teaching computer science; feels sorta like comparing a "wine and painting night" to a course in oil painting, in that you might shortcut to something acceptable-looking but with little understanding of how or why you did it. But they're kids and will probably quickly tune out during Dad Explains Linked Lists :)

Ideally I'd suggest starting off with some smaller guided exercises to get them familiar with the language, then work with them to spec out and implement a more interesting project. In my CS courses in college we implemented the minimax algorithm for tic-tac-toe and checkers, starting with a tic-tac-toe engine which just printed out its desired move and evolving along until we were displaying a checkerboard as it played along. Could be a good project for you since it's implementing something they're familiar with (board games), doesn't use anything weird like networking, and can introduce concepts such as recursion and complexity ("if we have it calculate the next move, how many possible moves are there? What if we calculate the next two moves? The next three?")

You could look into Turtle graphics and Clojure. This is a modern take on "Logo" - a language designed for children, but the learnings can be applied directly to Clojure/Clojurescript.

http://timothypratley.github.io/power-turtle/ (try in browser)