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Comment by berntb | Hacker News Reader

Why is a beginner's introduction to one of the common scripting languages at the top of HN?

Most everyone here should know at least one of the usual suspects (Ruby, Perl, Python, etc). They are all quite similar in capabilities.

Is introduction to loops at the top, in an hour?

Edit: The few newbies here which don't know a scripting language are hardly the ones voting this up...

Edit 2: BanzaiTokyo is free to explain the glaring superiority of one of the scripting languages over others...? :-)

Edit 3: erelde, so you really think a beginner's guide to a scripting language "gratifies [HN reader's] intellectual curiosity" enough to be top of HN...?

View on HN

Reading the opinions of others gratifies my own intellectual curiosity, and as I am one of HN's readers, it fullfills the definition.

PS: editing your own post to reply is a weird way to do things when there's a "reply" link under each comment...

>Why is a beginner's introduction to one of the common scripting languages at the top of HN?

I think there might be more non-programmers here than you think. Also, those who do program may have friends who don't and they may find the article interesting as something they can refer those friends to.

From the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [emphasis mine]

Python is very and increasingly popular and I guess the reason it is at the top is to recommend to the people who practice Perl or Ruby to take a look at this language as well.

I've been programming for 20 years and don't know any of those languages.

That's surprising! So which are the languages you use (I'd expect to not know any of them :-))

C++, C#, Javascript and now Swift.

I know many others who have been programming their whole lives in one or two programming languages. Once you get good at something and are well compensated, there may not be enough motivation to learn new languages. Specially when you have kids and other hobbies.

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