From: Brian Mitchell <binary42@...>
Date: 2005-10-11T17:33:50+09:00
Subject: Re: my mother wants to code?

On 10/11/05, Francois Paul <francois@bagasie.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> my 50 year old mother wants to learn to code.
> She has no computer experience, but she is surrounded with programmers
> (three sons and a husband) and she wants to be able to understand what
> we are talking about.
> She is also quite tired of being a math teacher and is considdering to
> quit her job in favour of helping with my webdev company (doing some
> mundane inhouse development).
>
> My little brother is busy teaching her Java but I feel Ruby is the
> better (friendlier, more productive) language. However I can't seem to
> find a good introduction to ruby that asumes no previous programming
> experience (there are plenty available for Java).
>
> can anyone point me in the right direction? also if you think it is a
> better idea to start programming in Java rather than Ruby, please let me
> know why.
>
> Regards,
>
> Francois
>
>

While Ruby is a great choice for expressiveness, some of the style
does not make sense right away to a non-programmer. I would vote that
you install Squeak. Smalltalk is similar to Ruby but Squeak provides a
very interactive and friendly environment. As a teacher, she may also
enjoy putting such a tools to good use.

Take the similarity that Ruby has to Smalltalk in general, a jump to
Ruby later would not be so hard. I hope her mind is still nimble
though; web stuff can be simple but the world is a fast moving target
with the advent of Web 2.0 and surrounding buzz.

Other languages could include more web oriented javascript + DOM +
html. C was my first language. While low level, it does a fine job of
getting basic imperative style down. BASIC is old but sometimes still
a good place to start, safer than C at least. Logo is another way to
jump start programming.

If you want here to suffer from memory loss or worsen health you could
suggest Prolog or Unlambda.

It really depends. Show her the set of most fitting languages and let
her pick. If she is really serious about learning it also must be
enjoyed (I've never know a good coder that didn't enjoy the work).

Brian.