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I completely agree. For example, he gives the example of an "associative array" as a concept that shouldn't be used to explain what a Lua table is, but really,
by jsharpe 17y ago
I completely agree. For example, he gives the example of an "associative array" as a concept that shouldn't be used to explain what a Lua table is, but really, for anyone with a moderate amount of programming experience, this is probably the most concise way of describing it.
It really depends on the audience. Someone who knows absolutely nothing will want a considerably different type of tutorial than someone who is already fluent in several languages. The latter just needs to be presented with a mapping between the given language and a language they are familiar with, and the "table" -> "associative array" analogy is pretty excellent from that standpoint.
- tetha 17y agoA good example for a language tutorial with audience considered and selected is the official python tutorial. If you are firm in some other object oriented language, this tutorial can teach you almost the entire working set of python in a day, at most. However, if you have no clue about programming, understanding this tutorial will be extremely confusing and time consuming to the point of being pointless. I have to say, I like this very much. I could just walk through this tutorial and associate existing concepts with pythons implementations of these concepts and just use it. Other language tutorials tend to annoy me by changing the level quite a lot or being way too low level.
- silentbicycle 17y agoIndeed. I think Python calling them "dictionaries" is pretty weird, but saying, "see, it's like a dictionary, you look up the key word and it has an associated value" is probably the right level of abstraction for someone new to programming.