Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gjm11 3789 days ago
I'm a bit puzzled about the exact level this is pitched at.

The intro seems to be aimed at someone who already knows enough to be building web apps (albeit with difficulty). "Here's a description of a bad experience trying to solve an Angular problem. Sound familiar?"

But then it switches gears and what follows seems more appropriate for a reader who is completely new to programming. "Let me define terms like 'bug', 'comment', 'function call' and 'loop' for you."

(Maybe the actual audience is people who have recently started trying to build web apps (or something of the kind) without learning the fundamentals, and have been barely surviving by copy-and-pasting things? It doesn't look like it from the other articles on the blog.)

I'm also not sure what our hypothetical beginner is supposed to do with this little glossary. On its own, it seems to me it has the exact same problem the author described earlier in the context of Angular documentation: you don't know what X means, so you look it up, but it's defined in terms of Y and Z which you also don't know. So you look up Y and it's defined in terms of P, Q, and X. Etc.

I think this sort of little glossary of basic terms is potentially useful, but only in the context of something -- e.g., perhaps the author's book -- that introduces these terms gradually, in an order chosen for ease of learning, and in a context where most of what's going on is something other than "here are some definitions to learn".

1 comments

Exactly. I read the intro and was confused by the sample SO answer, so I thought "why not put this dictionary idea to the test?". I tried to look up the words from the post that I didn't know: minifier, injector, controller... nope!