Jeff Mesnil
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⇨ Learnable Programming

October 23, 2012

Thought-provoking reading about learning to program. The essay is gorgeous with fantastic visuals to understand its arguments:

Being a server-side programmer during the day, I think the essay makes the wrong assumption that programs inherently have a visual representation that helps learn the language.
What is the visual representation of an algorithm code other than a single number for each step? Not all algorithms have a visual interpretation like the Fibonnacci sequence... Maybe I am not thinking outside of the box and such a representation do exist but I have not found it yet.

This essay makes a compelling argument that through the use of a graphic library (where the visual representation is the output of the program), we can learn the underlying programming language features (for loop, variable assignments) and abstractions (decomposition, abstraction).

(via daring fireball)