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
- GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and model card - 7th August 2025
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025