Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.