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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

I like the same author's "The Two Cultures of Computing"[0]. It's somewhat in the same vein, and also really important.

0: http://www.pgbovine.net/two-cultures-of-computing.htm

I've always had people who wanted to learn programming become so bogged down in the tools around programming. It led me to thinking that it might be better to teach the fundamentals with pen/paper/whiteboard. To get the "this is why programming is important/powerful" message across. Anyone tried this/had any success with it?

I have a small anecdote about this.

In the last couple of years I've had few people ask me 'how can I write a program with a GUI.' And I give the advice, 'Download the free version of Microsoft Visual Studio for C# and select new project, windows forms' and then start mucking around.

All of them were convinced by others to use qt and C++ All of them gave up after a week or two of no progress.

I got my start at "serious programming" using Visual Basic 6. There is a lot to be said for early successes.

I start with FoxPro DOS (2.6). After the end of the 3 months course, a full app with menus, forms, reports, etc. The same with Acces. Later Delphi (the best RAD ever!). In contrast, Visual Studio is clumsy.. but all others tools fall so far below than people truly imagine html+js is easy!

I haven't pushed it on any family-members yet, but "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" does a pretty good job building up from the basics, although my eyes started to glaze over a bit when it came to some of the circuit-diagrams.

Sort of. I taught middle-school students programming using Scratch (and a whiteboard) for three summers, and found that its interface of dragging and dropping blocks of code worked well for teaching programming fundamentals (conditionals, loops, functions, events, etc) without the hassle of a command-line.

I've done this in a non-professional environment to allow my partner to understand what I do.

We used a whiteboard to draw a flowchart of the logical steps needed to make Tetris work, then wrote pseudocode for those modules.

I've always had people who wanted to learn programming become so bogged down in the tools around programming

Bogged down in an editor and a compiler?

When first starting out, there are two tools.

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