Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming?
12th February 2012
My answer to Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming? on Quora
Absolutely not. The first step in learning to program is understanding that a computer can be quickly made to do something useful by executing lines of code. Personally I’m a big fan of firing up something with an interactive prompt (like Python, or even Firebug or the Google Chrome JS console) and demonstrating that typing a line of code hitting return will get a useful response.
More recent articles
- Trying out llama.cpp's new vision support - 10th May 2025
- Saying "hi" to Microsoft's Phi-4-reasoning - 6th May 2025
- Feed a video to a vision LLM as a sequence of JPEG frames on the CLI (also LLM 0.25) - 5th May 2025