I've done this inadvertently. Ironically, my intent was precisely to avoid discouraging a beginner, but this article makes me realise I was, at best, sending m

I've done this inadvertently. Ironically, my intent was precisely to avoid discouraging a beginner, but this article makes me realise I was, at best, sending mixed messages. I was helping somebody who was taking a Java course without a prior programming background. Her course required her to submit assignments as Java applets, and she was running into a lot of trouble getting applets to even run on her laptop, due to Java version conflicts and browsers being much stricter about applet security than they used to be. I hated to see her getting discouraged by this pure incidental complexity - this wasn't even a problem with the code! So I said something like "I'm not sure why they're even teaching you applets, nobody uses them any more". Of course what I meant was "they're making it harder than it needs to be and programming is actually easier and more fun than this". But she may have heard "you're spending all this effort learning something that's already out of date" :(