I spent the day teaching programming to beginners. A few things jump out:
1. Our tools suck for beginners. You write text in, nothing comes out, unless you ask for it. Beginners, by definition, don’t know what to ask for.
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2. Professionals learn enough to draw all sorts of diagrams (state machines, system architecture, messaging, etc).
Our tools should be constantly offering these visual representations to us.
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3. The browser has some of this (inspect elements, networking, etc) but it is not enough of a development environment for the beginner to see cause and effect clearly.
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5. Syntax constantly gets in the way.
Most of our tools still haven’t taken the Syntax Cliff seriously:
elm-lang.org/news/the-synta
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