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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

As much as there has been lots of trash talking here about Neocities due to it being 'just' HTML and CSS, I teach high school kids on a semi-regular basis (teaching summer camp right now) and that's the thing they're _most_ jazzed about.

I told them all to sign up. They were super pumped.

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This is how I got started with programming. Then later I wanted to make some things conditionally displayed, so I learned a scripting language. Then I wanted to write non-spaghetti code, so I learned more about how to structure projects. Etc.

I think it's an organic way to learn. It's instantly rewarding.

This is actually the _exact_ same way I started learning to program.

I started with a book on HTML 4.01 and designing a webpage for my sixth grade class. Then I started to learn CSS to make maintenance a bit easier. In seventh grade I learned javascript so that I could have epic-site-battles with the eighth graders. I fondly remember adding different cursor-trail effects every week.

Yes, I did go on to learn PHP (4) -- and free hosts were easy enough to find back then. However dynamic sites is not what _sparked_ my interest. In the very beginning all I _needed_ was geocities. A few static pages and a URL was all I wanted.

I didn't know [or necessarily _want to know_] about subdomains or DNS; at first I didn't even know how to run PHP on my own machine! -- At the time my development cycle was roughly: [write -> FTP -> test -> DOH. Typo. -> write -> FTP -> actual test -> write ->] ...

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We all have to start somewhere -- and a full stack framework would've confused the snot out of me back then. So in a way: I'm thankful for my humble beginnings; and I'm happy to see that neocities will provide that chance for someone else.

I stopped at the cursor-trail effects and started watching anime and playing video games instead ;_;

Why are they most jazzed about HTML and CSS?

Is it because they can create something immediate and show it to others online?

This is http://codenow.org/ in NYC, by the way. The organization partners with my employer, Jumpstart Lab.

This particular iteration is six weeks, all the kids did a weekend with us during the school year. Last week was reviewing very basic programming concepts in Ruby, then this week, we did ruby-processing, and then Sinatra, so the HTML came into play.

I think it's because it's a more graphical medium; many of them can see how it's 'neat,' but when doing just textual stuff, they get bored easily. The processing was kinda interesting, but I think the simplicity of making something graphical was what really made them get pumped. Then, now they're more excited to learn more Ruby so that they can build more complex sites, but (at least with this group) it's a means to an end.

We haven't actually deployed anything public yet, so they haven't been able to share, I bet that'll be another huge leap in interest.

Thanks for the info. I wish I had this back in the 90s.

Did they try Ruby Shoes (or whatever replaced it) as a fun side GUI project?

Yes! Their very first lessons were with Hackety Hack, actually. They did some shoes-ing after that.

I remember when I was 13 and first realized that I could HTML was what webpages were and that I could write it myself. It was 1997 and Geocities was my best friend. I was so excited.

and javascript!! You can do anything in javascript ... want a database, no problem, store it as json and use js. You can not run any server side scripting like jsp or php, but you can pull files down and process them locally. Sure, you're not going to store a massive database in json and process it locally, but you can do a lot with this and a little creativity.

Can you put the files back again? If you can write data back again then you've got enough for a full platform.

If it allowed that and directories. I've already written the environment that would give you a full desktop.

I build products that assume most people won't be running app servers in the future. It's so easy to use an external service available through JS to build a fully featured application.

The problem right now is just teaching people that this is possible, and to make it easier for them.

Not to mention JS. There's a LOT you can do with that.

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