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Comment by dragandj | Hacker News Reader

Is there one single beginner that starts their programming journey with notepad.exe? I've never seen a single one, and I see hundreds of them each year.

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Notepad++? Textmate? Look at the first paragraph of the first chapter of Chris Pine’s Learn to Program.

Now that you've gotten everything setup, let's write a program! Open up your favorite text editor and type in the following:

puts 1+2 Save your program (yes, that's a program!) as calc.rb (the .rb is what we usually put at the end of programs written in Ruby). Now run your program by typing ruby calc.rb into your command line. It should have put a 3 on your screen. See, programming isn't so hard, now is it?

Why not just start at the REPL or with a Notebook? Having an interactive environment seems like it would be easier to learn the language. Then they can move to a code editor when they're ready for writing more complex programs.

It's this sort of thing that probably drives the likes of Alan Kay crazy when even learning a language isn't interactive by default.

I agree, but there is also something conceptually useful in learning early that a program is code saved in a text container that is then either compiled or interpreted.

The clojure equivalent isn't much worse:

   (println (+ 1 2))

Then

    clojure calc.clj

There’s mine? I used Notepad to create my first Windows .bat file (in fact, it was rather a juvenile piece of malware that opened notepad.exe thousands of times), which was the first programming I ever did. I later went on to use Notepad to modify files for a desktop game and write my first PHP and Ruby scripts. Now I write software professionally (including, but not limited to, Clojure) using a Mac :)

I did!

I used notepad when I first started learning PHP.

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