Want to learn to program? Here's your first lesson

I think it's great you're helping out people who want to learn with posts like this.

A couple critiques: When I was first learning, I was desperate for Hello World code I could paste and run. As basic as this tutorial is, sometimes even a little abstraction makes it hard for newbies to grasp. For example, why not make the doWhatever function do something, so they can run the code and see how it works?

Same with assignment vs eval... demonstrate it in a fully functioning piece of code they can copy, paste and hack themselves.

Analogies to noble gases aren't the best... since non science people may not even remember what that is. Also, a can easily be changed, so I'm not sure the analogy even holds.

Nice post overall. I think Hacker news should have a way to easily find all articles like this.