Ask HN: How would you get a friend started on programming

[vishnupr]

A close friend of mine recently came to me to teach him programming. He had absolute 0 background knowledge in the subject. Otherwise, he's a smart guy with a genius keen interest to learn.

I started teaching him some simple Objective C syntax. After doing some if & while demos, I taught him the concept of OOP and made a very simple app that relies heavily on OOP with him. By now, I could clearly tell that the guy was totally confused and didn't really understand the concepts of OOP. A few more attempts and 2 hours later, we both gave up.

How would you have done it? What resources would you have used? What language would you teach a first-timer?

Or a different question would be: How did you yourself get started on programming?

[sirwitti]

i think, you can´t do everything all at once. since programming is quite abstract, perhaps it would be enough to do some basic stuff like variables, ifs and basic output.

most important (to me): always show the results, like run the program. otherwise people have no clue what all those strange lines mean and do. martin