My Top Tip for Helping People Get Started Programming


Set up their shell, PATH, and dependencies. Have them use VS Code, and if there’s any tooling issues, tell them you’ll fix it. Saves months of frustration and time. Learning that stuff up front sucks.

Doing this let me get my brother almost halfway through Haskell Programming from First Principles and several friends through introduction to data science classes.

It’s better than opening with what bash is and how it parses a command line anyway.

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