How We Teach Programming, and Where We're Going Wrong
hello world is outdated<p>i think this alone probably turns away the majority of would be computationally literate individuals<p>as i was being taught programming i was so ridiculously underwhelmed by a program writing out hello world<p>here i am on this machine that can play my favourite movie, entertain me with a beautiful interactive gaming experience, and connect me to the world&#x27;s information and i am supposed to be wowed by &#x27;hello world&#x27;<p>i only understood the power of hello world when i became interested in embedded systems<p>so much time setting up the ide and connections and circuits and somehow i managed to make this previously idle pile of organised metals print hello world<p>that was a a profound experience but this was years after i had become a competent programmer and had the understanding of physics to appreciate what was happening<p>if you want to teach programming then you have to show people that the process can help them do something they want to do<p>there used to be classes to solely teach typing without looking<p>everyone i knew hated it, it was a pain for everyone in the class, then instant messenger came out and suddenly everyone was a professional typist banging out 60wpm<p>if social media was only available to people through bash scripts i assure you everyone would be able to program in a few weeks<p>because that is what people want to use a computer for right now<p>but that would be regressive at this point<p>so i&#x27;d suggest the future of programming education should be folded into mathematics education<p>learning times tables? write a script to express that table<p>even better would be to pull problems from a web api, solve, and post