Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

The important part is not the 'never.' The important part is that the _very first thing_ you tell new programmers is "Don't worry about this, it's magic, just ignore it."

This sets a certain kind of tone and expectation about programming that's quite poor.

View on HN

Or you can say: "Don't worry about this now, we will explain it later" :-)

... which still gives the same impression: code is magic.

Compare to this:

    #include <stdio.h>
    
    int main() {
        printf("Hello world!\n");
        return 0;
    }

Woo! Your first program and I count, at most, 2 things that could be described as "magic" for someone who's never seen C before (the stdio library and double quotes being syntactic sugar for an array of chars). Even then, those two things are deterministic, so they won't remain magical for long.

"But what does 'return 0' do?" "It returns the value zero to the calling process." "Calling what?" "The process. Usually it will be the shell." "Wait, you just said process, what is this 'shell'?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com