Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jemmeh 3410 days ago
It really just depends on the person. I have a few tutorial videos up on Youtube, and it's pretty 50/50 on the comments being "this is too fast" and "thanks for not rambling, slow tutorials are annoying".

I think in general someone this new to programming concepts would probably want something a little slower. Once you get the main concepts down for programming then you can speed up, but the abstract thinking is hard for a lot of people to wrap their head around at first.

1 comments

YouTube is really a very different case, and in fact the opposite is the case for text.

For speech, the speaker sets the pace, so the challenge of accessibility is actually twofold: the speaker needs to both be clear and not too fast (or too "efficient").

In text, it's the opposite: the reader sets the pace, so more efficient writing will make reading (at whatever pace) less taxing.

You make a good point and I see where you're coming from. But I've gone through a few text tutorials that just fly through the topics without going into enough depth or examples. I think if you're fairly advanced in a skill, sometimes it's hard to relate to the mindset of someone who is new to it. Like, oh, this is so easy to me, I only need one sentence to explain it. But really it needs a whole paragraph.

It's all a balancing act of course. Like you said, has to be both clear and fast.