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Comment by Grieving | Hacker News Reader

That's true. I didn't expect something that would be perfect, but this was basically someone's list of steps to make a webapp with bootstrap, pagination, slugs, and a single CRUD resource.

If you're going to start with web dev, better to teach teach plain HTML and CSS, and enough JS to make something small happen, then let them run with it and help them customize it. Something like an in-browser alarm clock would be interesting. Show them how to change the font, colors, sound, background image (maybe even a background slideshow), and some animations.

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I was going to say "I'd skip all the traditional web-dev stuff and just make a little Go application that serves a web endpoint with something neat in it"... and then I stopped myself and thought about how much boiler-plate and explanations and step-by-step you'd need just to get kids compiling Hello, World... Teaching kids is hard.

Edit: i appreciate Go because there's not as much boilerplate or setup required as with some languages (unpack the tarball, set $PATH, and I'm off to the races) but even those steps mean we're talking about shells and directory trees.

You could run a bit of JavaScript right off your filesystem. It would require nothing but a browser and a text editor.

Otherwise, it's really easy to get lost in boilerplate before you even know what the payoff is.

> You could run a bit of JavaScript right off your filesystem. It would require nothing but a browser and a text editor.

It's good to show what's possible but it isn't fun and will bore them to death fast because it's very limiting for beginners.

I suppose it depends on what sparked their curiosity in the first place. Every professional has an origin story, something that made them want to slog through years of practice to get to where they are.

I can think of many ways to spark people's interest in cooking or music, but programming seems a bit harder to me. I never thought about why I love it, let alone why others should.

How would you do that?

> I can think of many ways to spark people's interest in cooking or music

Combining programming with music is a cool idea - https://sonic-pi.net/

> I was going to say "I'd skip all the traditional web-dev stuff...

Go is simple but not really beginner friendly. In my opinion teaching novices should start with Ruby (not Python or Javascript that's so often is the case). Show them how to do simple scripts, later build some games together.

Web-dev stuff like React, Webpack, Node etc should be out of the question, it would be a huge turn off for kids; heck it is that even for adults.

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