Learning To Code: Are We Having Fun Yet?

theodp writes "Nate West has a nice essay on the importance of whimsy in learning to program. "It wasn't until I was writing Ruby that I found learning to program to be fun," recalls West. "What's funny is it really doesn't take much effort to be more enjoyable than the C++ examples from earlier...just getting to write gets.chomp and puts over cout > made all the difference. Ruby examples kept me engaged just long enough that I could find Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby." So, does the future of introductory computer programming books and MOOCs lie in professional, business-like presentations, or does a less-polished production with some genuine goofy enthusiasm help the programming medicine go down?"

Comments

You're doing it wrong

[benjfowler]

If you have to make learning to code 'fun', you're probably doing it wrong.

It shouldn't need to be made 'fun', as it's the intrinsic motivation of getting the computer to do something is its own reward.

Anyway, you don't go out of your way to make it _un-fun_, by forcing loads of sophisticated concepts and useless syntactic sugar on people right from the get-go, you start by, keeping things simple, doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, only introducing abstractions and concepts when they're absolutely needed, and by being powerful enough to let people 'scratch their own itch' to solve interesting and useful problems.

C++, C#, Java, Ada are terrible choices for a beginners language (yet the fucking idiots at my university changed to Java, because it was "practical", although it completely blew their pass rate.)
Python, Ruby, Scheme are far better choices.