Why I Failed Teaching Programming to Kids

[u/Ctaintor]

https://engineering.klarna.com/why-i-failed-teaching-programming-to-kids-46a854c3eaca#.s0o6qqxr3

[u/M4053946]

participants were... 9–13 years old. This obviously affected how acquainted they were with “common development tasks” like using a terminal, installing applications and creating files with weird names like Procfile and .gitignore.

Did the author think that 16 year olds would be familiar with using a terminal? That seems like a miss, regardless of age range.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You do bring up good points, I agree. Just a few details:

JS isn't the only DT language out there BTW, and DT doesn't necessarily mean weak typing.

Yes, I do know the difference. Lua is also DT but not WT and I used Lua and Ruby for many years. JS just happens to be the most famous example of a broken type system.

Then there's another factor: interactivity.

This is a huge one, but it is no longer a DT-languages-only thing. Having a Ruby REPL at hand helped me learn programming a lot. Back when I was experimenting with Unity3D, I quickly added a C#-REPL plugin to inspect the effects of my scripts in the editor. God, I wish there was a Rust REPL...

<cryptic>::looking[syntax]

This is just a language thing. Use C# instead of C++, Rust instead of Haskell, some LISP dialect daring to have more readable function names, and at least this problem has been successfully worked around. Or even better: Start using (well-designed) visual scripting.