Let’s start with an obvious fact:
The Inconvenient Human Nature, #1
People are inherently more easily attracted by “interesting” (as opposed to “mundane”) things. (We will define “interesting” in the later parts)
What can we derive from this simple axiom?
A lot of things. But since we’re talking about learning programming, we shall focus mainly on the implications it has for how we learn programming.
Programming, the interesting and the mundane
The Interesting
What was the first thing that struck you when you first learned how to program? Wasn’t it the simple fact that you could order a computer to do stuff by simply typing a bunch of characters (thinking of the “hello world” program that we all have written)? But what happened then? You (hopefully) would learn the things that happened under the hood and drove your programs, which leads us to the first point:
If it’s something under the hood, it’s interesting (therefore attracts people).
People are always curious about the forces behind the phenomenons in nature since the dawn of human civilization. There’s a need for people to seek the reason why something happened. We call it the desire to understand.