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Comment by Sinidir | Hacker News Reader

I have seen this phenomenon so often in explanations/tutorials of different things. People seem to not have a concrete target audience in mind. They simply write of cuff.

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I'll go one step further: for many slightly-obscure technical topics, the intermediate writing between beginner and advanced is rare or simply doesn't exist. I struggled with this when I was trying to learn functional programming--writing on the subject is mostly linked-lists/lambda/map/reduce/filter, or όλα είναι ελληνικά για μένα. This goes even for better writers who do have an audience in mind: their audience is either complete beginners, or people with advanced academic degrees in the field. It took me years to find writings that bridge that gap.

What material did you find? I too have noticed this gap and been searching.

I found a lot of the stuff on Matt Might's blog helpful. He writes a bit about compiling Scheme to C, which allows me to see what each piece of Scheme is doing in a language I know.[1] Following this approach, I found LISP In Small Pieces[2], Compiling With Continuations[3], etc. There's more but I have to dig it up.

[1] http://matt.might.net/articles/programming-with-continuation...

[2] https://pages.lip6.fr/Christian.Queinnec/WWW/LiSP.html

[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compiling-with-continua...

This X 1000. I tried learning programming several times in my younger life, maybe 3 or 4 efforts at getting some 'basics'. Never thought I would be able to program until I picked up Unity on a whim and started learning C#. Lo and behold, documentation is now plentiful and tutorials are a vast landscape.

Nearly every 'beginner' lesson or tutorial or book on programming that I have seen state in the beginning that 'some programming experience recommended.'

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