The key to this (lovely) story, IMHO, is the iterative nature of the lesson. Each step was very small, built on the previous one, and resulted in clearly visibl

The key to this (lovely) story, IMHO, is the iterative nature of the lesson. Each step was very small, built on the previous one, and resulted in clearly visible changes to the program. For novices, this is absolutely vital- especially in a classroom environment like this. Now, re: the appropriateness of Ruby's somewhat-odd syntax for this lesson- I agree that there's definitely some weird arbitrary-seeming stuff in Ruby ("darkred" vs "dark red", etc.). But, let's face it- ALL languages have a few weird syntax things here and there, especially from the standpoint of a novice programmer. It's just part of the way that computers and programming languages work, and anybody who wants to write code is going to have to learn to deal with it. From my experience teaching novice programmers, however, I can tell you that a lot depends on HOW The problem is that, with most languages and in most intro lessons that I've seen, the student is exposed to all of them all at once without much context. I feel like the lesson described in this article did a great job of introducing the students to these language "features" one or two at a time and in a relatively sensible order. Eg, the students first got used to the idea that the computer was picky about upper- vs. lower-case letters. Next, they got their heads around the idea that attributes often involve a weird sequence of characters ("=>"). Then, they were exposed to the "identifiers-can't-have-spaces" rule. Etc., etc., etc. By the time they were exposed to each new oddity of the syntax, they'd had a chance to absorb the one that had gone before.