On 29/01/2015 10:15, Tim Streater wrote:
In article o.uk,
Dave Liquorice wrote:

On 28 Jan 2015 22:19:59 GMT, Huge wrote:

... (13) is interested in learning how to write code ...

Code to do what? Writing a game that is much above Pong or Breakout
takes a lot of effort. "Hello World" gets boring after a while. There
has to be an itch that needs to scratched.

Yes. In my case it's been an email client.

I'd go for Python.

Hum, personally I'm not keen on Python, it relies on correct and non
mixed (tab/space) indentation to run and when it doesn't it doesn't,
in my experience, tell you that it's upset about the indentation, it
just weird things (cause code is being run in an unexpected order) or
falls over with an error "that can't happen", except when the code is
running in an unexpected order.

For my email client I've had, for OS X, Win7, and Linux, to make a
double-clickable program that can if required put up an error message
in a pane and run a PHP script that does the real startup work.

I started on this under OS X using AppleScript which I found tedious
but doable with a bit of googling.

I was expecting that it would be easier using Visual Basic under Win7 -
no, it was harder. But hardest of all was Python under Linux. I ended
up just cutting and pasting code until it worked, with no particular
understanding of what I was doing, or what any of it was supposed to
mean.

Starting with HTML/CSS and moving on to PHP might be good place as
you get results straight away. If he has a Smartphone developing
something for that should give good rewards, the tools for Android
are free, donno about iOS.

I'd avoid any of the "teaching" languages, why learn something that
isn't used in the real world? It might give a grounding in the basic
way that code is structured but you can get that from any more main
stream languages with a decent "Beginers Guide to ..." book or online
tutorial.

All good advice, IMO.


In MSAccess circa 2000, I was grateful for the macro record facility.
Seeing how the actions you want to automate translate into code, which
you can then tweak, made the whole thing more accessible for a beginner.