Post #1402981
2026-03-30 11:17 UTC
@edwinb a member of my family recently learned to program in their late 30s. Had interest in computing their whole life and I think had tried some small courses before but it never clicked. Then we tried making a mod for the game Project Zomboid together and pretty soon they were writing lots of Lua.
If you ask me to teach a random person to program I will first talk to them to find a project they are interested in making, and then use any programming language which can accomplish their project.
Replies (1)
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@SusanPotter@mastodon.social 2026-03-30 11:32
@0x2ba22e11 FWIW when I was a mathematics student (many moons ago), I had a "need" to build a searchable discography and tour dates website for my favorite band so I ended up learning perl 4 to build it...it was the latest version at the time. My second language was C++ which I think was a bad idea in retrospect. So, I do think focusing on the learner's "needs"/interests and matching language to that are key to getting them further down the learning pipeline.