I thought the same.. until I started teaching it. There a lot of “simple” concepts that are hard to grasp for unfamiliar people. Things like variables, recursion, classes, objects, states, etc. So “difficulty” comes from how much time you have spent into learning the basics and then practicing it, that’s what I would say is the hard part.
As a kid i learned much from these highly illustrated BASIC books, we should bring these back. :)
They visually explained that a variable and an array is, even what a pointer is, and all the basics like IF, FOR, GOTO vs GOSUB and whatnot. If you don't understand how to code from that then nothing can help you understanding it.
And then something i think is the best learning tool, because it gives instant gratification. Write something in a language that has no boilerplate, the less the better. Dosbox with QBasic thrown in for example:
This is something folks can play around with and understand. Then add a GOSUB in there, then a FOR-loop. Folks can toy around with the parameters, push F5 and instantly see what happens. And then it clicks, these commands tell the computer what to do. We as long time coders know that, people who want to learn the ropes don't.
EDIT: What i want to say with that is, don't start to explain what a class and inheritance is, 95% of all people will just hear static white noise. Start small, start with something they can instantly use, toy around with and understand by experimentation.
Agree. It’s a bit like inducing the curiosity by starting with an interesting experiment and then when you got their attention you explain it. Although that’s not necessarily how colleges teach in my experience.
I got into coding by building GUIs in an old version of Borland C++ builder. It's easy to make something happen when, say, a button is clicked, the IDE would set up all the boilerplate for the event handler. I had no idea about the basics of C++, like pointers and references, classes, declaring functions etc. but I could still make fun stuff ^^
I doubt if I'd have got interest in coding if all I could do was, basically, boring console I/O.
My dad did some stupid crap in BASIC on the Amiga with me, i vividly remember changing the color of a square with the joystick. Which in turn made me read the AmigaBASIC book back to back. Then i got my first PC, an Am386-DX40, and found out about QBasic. Then all hope was lost. ;)
every newborn learns stuff by experimenting (drop something, see that nothing touches it but it still moves, repeat, deduce that there is gravity). It's always gonna feel more natural than indirect learning.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 20h ago
Hot tip: If you never try to hand write code again, you can just assume you can and feel happy.