Teach someone to program

I’ve changed this from “teach a non-programmer to program in Ruby” to “teach someone to program”. I’m not tied to a language, why should my goal be tied to a language? Also in the more general case of teaching programming, someone can reasonable be expected to be a non-programmer.

I’ve had basically no luck with this goal. If I made it more general, to teach someone to program better, I suppose I could do ok but my real goal is to make computers approachable to more people. Check out Hackety Hack by Why the Lucky Stiff. This will probably be the tool I use in my next attempts at teaching programming. I’m already pressuring my wife to try it.

I am wearing my wife down. I think she would love Ruby if she would take the time to try it. She hasn’t done programming since the Trash-80 days, so I think she counts.

My sister recently became unemployed. She asked me how a non-techie could learn something about programming. I pointed her at Chris Pine’s tutorial and Why’s beautifuly poignant guide. Then, I had Learn to Program and the pickaxe overnighted to her. She lives in Seattle so if I could just get her to go to the Seattle.rb meetings and hacking nights, she would be well on her way.

I also volunteered to teach an online friend how to program. I don’t know how serious he is about learning but it is definitely a start.