 Got into a discussion with someone on Twitter about what makes a programming language "good for beginners". They seemed to want to talk about syntax and stuff. My questions are: - how hard is it to install 25 comments
 @darius Excel as a platform for learning about logic, working with datasets, and dependencies is a lovely thing.  @darius Spreadsheets are the modern BASIC: the only way most people know how to make a computer do a thing they want. But the problem with powerful products designed for a niche, is that you can make a half-assed version of anything with them. So people do, constantly. A PM at a pervious job had a GANTT chart in a spreadsheet, using cell sizes and background colors, which they updated by hand. There's a lot of that kind of thing out there. @darius Making the computer do stuff is good, but a spreadsheet really isn't a very good tool for general jobs. I think it's an indictment of the whole industry that every computer doesn't ship with a powerful, general system which is simple for an average user to understand and use. IT takes a shitload of creativity to build stuff in Excel. Imagine if that got applied more directly to the problem, instead of how to express it in Excel. @artemis funny you mention Haskell because I just realized that the spreadsheet model for data propagation is functional programming! But yes some flavors of BASIC are great candidates too  @darius Excel being the defacto development environment for office solutions is what makes it so hard to replace Microsoft in that space. Though most people writing code in Excel probably don't think of themselves programmers. Everything is a spreadsheet. And if it isn't, it's a spreadsheet that dynamically fetches data from Sharepoint to produce a PDF.  @darius i keep wishing for something that is spreadsheets but a little more database, a little less brittle, a little less indecipherable-once-it-gets-very-complicated. these are all programmer prejudices, of course, but i don't think they're wrong. i just think the massive programmer prejudice against spreadsheets as a whole idea has sort of kept a lot of the people who could make this happen from doing anything in the space between spreadsheets and other things. it seems so possible though. @darius I think another important consideration is would the tool scratch an itch for the learner and get them interested? Spreadsheets are great for some things, but if the learner is interested in making game-ish things I think Scratch is a great place to start. Building on "Logo", a lot of work was done to make the system intuitive and easy to learn, avoid syntax errors entirely, and be approachable for kids. @Eliot_L Yes that's totally fair! Basically replace "import useful data and output results in a useful format" with "do something that the programmer finds really helpful/interesting"  In my last job we used Excel to create our “Interim Training database.” You could almost here it buzz and whirrr as it opened and closed multiple windows in order to data enter. Only one person could use it at a time. I loved it! A low-tech built for purpose database connected to a user-friendly dashboard. Five years later, they are still using it, and it’s meeting operational and compliance needs. One of the coolest things I’ve ever done.   @darius I don't disagree with your criteria, but I'm realizing points 3 and 4 makes for an uphill slog for any new entrants that are intended for beginners... Which makes me think that creating a language just for beginners is probably not a correct approach. (I can see your argument about Excel. Although I think it needs some better error messages. 😆 ) @darius The two points touching on access to support I think about a lot when choosing frameworks or whatever in developer learning resources, it's safe to assume looking outside the immediate interface for answers will continue to be routine, whether that interface is entirely programmatic or not.. Spreadsheets ftw! @darius your post reminded me of a post I saw a while back regarding storytelling being effective for teaching programming to girls. Turns out this is being studied and has some recent backing: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/gender-balance-in-computing-storytelling-approach-engaging-girls/ It’s not a specific language / platform but I think it’s a similar line of questioning you’re exploring in your thread! @darius I taught my niece Ruby using Hackety Hack years ago. It was an easy install, Ruby is (imo) fun and generally useful, and there's plenty of Ruby help/resources out there. It looks like Hackety Hack is no longer maintained, but that would have been my answer 10 years ago 😆 I can't think of anything better than Excel today. Do kids still learn TI-BASIC on their graphing calculators?  @darius I think also the community around the programming language is super important. e.g. |
Gregory's Server
I was defending Excel as an obvious candidate for best programming language for beginners (I consider the syntax and the runtime environment to both be part of the core language; in the case of Excel you can't separate one from the other)