That is exactly the goal, a first take on programming aimed a total newbie with no prior experience of any kind. I’m not planning a course to build up professional skills, there are plenty of excellent resources for that, and it is beyond my capabilities. I’d like it to be a funny exploration of a new way to use a computer, and approach problem solving and analytical thinking.
patrickdm
mroll
Lots of great insight here but I’d personally suggest getting them started on Racket with the free textbook How to Design Programs, written by the brilliant Matthias Felleisen (among others). I am biased since he was my university professor, but it’s a great introduction to programming from a functional perspective, and many language features from Racket (PLT Scheme) were borrowed for elixir, especially the metaprogramming features.
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ityonemo
I second staying away from otp, but depending on the person, using raw message passing (spawn, send, receive, and friends) to “chat” between nodes can be a fun way to learn basics about concurrency, network addressing, distributed name lookup (and name authorities) and… Message passing. As long as you make sure “don’t do this for realz” is peppered throughout.
Iirc there was a teacher who did this with an elementary school class in erlang and they loved it.
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ityonemo
The good news is that the js community is getting more and more functional and it is even possible to have a career in Js where you never write a class (though you should probably understand how they work).
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patrickdm
I really loved the little time I spent with racket, but I fear it will be too intimidating. Anyway after a first period I’m planning to make an explorative tour of other languages, and I’d like to thank you for the suggestion (I was thinking of something like a bit of Js, SonicPi for ruby, Pharo’s smalltalk, a glance of swi prolog..) I will remember to include Racket/Scheme for a taste of lisp. Many thanks for the linked book too, I feel I could borrow lot of interesting material from it.
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patrickdm
I like the idea of aiming at a super simple distributed system with two nodes and processes implementing a sort of local network chat, I feel it could be a very funny final project for the course, the cherry to put on top of the cake! Thank you @ityonemo, I haven’t thought of that, knowing where I want to go makes the planning of the whole journey much easier!,
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ityonemo
josefrichter
kpanic
Hey @josefrichter I don’t know. I just knew its existence. Maybe you could open an issue in their github repo?
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LeoUgiete
I think it’s excellent, at University I started with Haskell, another functional language and this kinda avoid some OO bias and helped me when I was introduced to C, Python and so on
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