- Focus on the concrete.
- Shorter and snappier.
- Emphasise the impact on real life, discuss how it can improve the reader’s
- Don’t get too deep in this intro - use it to lure in, and impress with
conciseness rather than expertise
- Add headers for each paragraph
–>
What can be achieved with programming?
Chances are, you are more afraid of code than it is of you.
It’s much easier than you think and can help you
solve problems you didn’t even know you had.
The posts here show’s an iceberg-tip’s worth of what programming can do and
aims to help encourage applying programming to your life. The sooner the better.
Programming is a gateway skill; a pragmatic problem solving drug which enables
us to enhance our interactions with an expanding domain of pursuits.
It gives us access to advanced tools for realising our creative and intellectual goals,
but also gives us new lateral pathways into areas of knowledge we mightn’t have
explored otherwise.
Whether we learn it to further our career or for interest’s sake alone,
taking the first steps into programming is certain to bring surprising and tangential
reward; The payoff is exponential.
There are considerable hurdles to getting started. I can’t expect to fully understand
how it feels to approach programming from another person’s mind, and I don’t plan
to tackle all of the nuanced struggles here, but I have observed a overwhelming number
of people unable to find a starting point.
I’ve decided to write the articles here in an attempt to demystify, introduce,
and encourage programming by showcasing the breadth of its application in as many
fun ways as I can. I intent for each post to partially answer the question
“What else can programming do?”, and I intend to write each with the tone in which
I explain computing to my layfriends.
We are often asked as programmers what the best language is, or what the
best language is for learning first. The ultimate answer dissatisfies most listeners,
as it’s heavily caveated with respect to the user’s intention:
Each language’s use is affected by its design goal, its community, its ease of
use, its resource consumption, and your preference. Yuck.
Here, I address that question by discussing and choosing the right language for
each outcome. Oftentimes the ease of use factor will prevail over the others,
since I want to keep the posts accessible, but I will strive to show a broad range
of language types.
If you haven’t before, I recommend taking the first steps by downloading a nice text editor or
IDE. I’m currently using vscode for most languages.
Have a look through the posts which interest you, follow the associated install
instructions, and play around! I find that people are shocked at how much simpler
it is once they see the process end-to-end.
Just being comfortable with a code editor will place you light-years ahead when
programming rears its beautiful head at some point in your life.