Ask HN: What is the hierarchy of programming?

If you want something 'universal', Knuth's books might be a decent place to start, although you won't be doing anything practical for a while.

I think the field is too new, changing too rapidly, and has too many people with widely varying goals (computer science vs make a small web site in PHP) to really have much that's 'universal' besides "get out there and practice!".

That's got to be the most difficult to answer question ever here.

It's like asking how to climb Mount Everest. The flippant answer of course is 'by taking the first step'.

What you learn first is different for everybody, just like that first step on to the path that leads to the summit of Mount Everest is different for everybody. It depends, in the first place, on where you currently are.

So without knowing where you currently are it is next to impossible to answer the question in a way that would make sense to you.

Could you maybe describe a bit of what you already know, your skills and your experience to date? That would help enormously.

I know nothing about programming (maybe that is obvious from the odd question). If someone had an interest in learning, where would he start? Are the paths so varied that even the basics are not universal?

Unless you have a strong, raw intellectual motivation in the endeavor, start by learning whatever allows you to accomplish tasks of interest to you. This is a strong motivating factor. If you like it, you'll keep learning more in order to accomplish more.

Tasks that save you time and effort are a good place to start. Tasks that entertain you are another.

In this regard, a scripting language with a good interface to your system (file access, graphics/presentation support, network support) is often cited as a good place to start. Many people suggest Python.

As you move to tackling larger problems, and/or growing your previous work, you'll find it beneficial to learn more about designs and techniques that aid in staying organized, keeping your work maintainable and efficient, etc. At that point, you'll want to look beyond the references for the language you started in and learn more general principles. (But even when you start, look for the BEST references in the language of your choice. The best references incorporate some of this context and explain it well, giving you a head start and helping you to avoid "bad" practices you may latter have to "unlearn".)

P.S. Perhaps implied in the above, the environment you want to work in / control will influence your choice. For "general" programming -- freestanding programs running on your machine -- you might find e.g Python the best starting point. If you mostly want to control things in your browser, then Javascript (along with HTML, CSS, and the DOM model -- which is already incorporating a quantity of semi-arbitrary detail that frustrates some people). If you were trying to ease administering a UNIX-flavor environment, you might consider Perl. If you spend most of your time in Microsoft Office documents, then Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or whatever it is these days.

How long it takes depends largely on you. Some people, particularly with a strong motivation to accomplish specific things, learn quite a lot in a couple of months. On the other hand, I've worked with people having technology degrees who nonetheless seem fairly clueless.

Concepts, typically most important are:

  . variables 
  . code 
  . conditional code (if statements) 
  . repeating code (loops/while/until/for) 
  . code grouping (procedures/methods/functions) 
  . variable grouping (records/structs)

More advanced concepts then become

  . boolean logic (extension to conditionals)
  . Object oriented coding (think: code+struct grouping)
  . namespaces (think: grouping of objects)
  . generics / reflections
  . pointers
    (certain languages expose this completely
    (some implicitly: through pass by val or pass by ref
    (some implicitly: by primitives vs objects
  . preprocessor (only certain languages)
  . recursion (repeating code but through function)
  . functional features

----

How do you pick these concepts up? Few ways, but I think the following three are most common:

1) Old School Method :: Understand what is happening on the bare metal, and then work building syntactic sugar between what is happening really, and what you want to happen.

  Assembly
  -> C
    -> OPP (C++/Java/C#)
      -> scripting (Perl/Python/Ruby)
        -> Functional (Lisp)

2) New Schooling :: Doing simple things in simple way (KISS principle), and then moving towards complicated systems ( a decent litmus test for language complexity is 'hello world' program. The more lines / syntax it requires, the more complicated language is. For example: for Java one needs to use objects / namespaces / static methods / functions / etc ) -> used by new academia

  Scripting (Python/Ruby)
  -> C#/Java/C++

3) Learning on the job :: fixing existing code, read code, tweak it, rinse, repeat. Learn from examples. Used by some vocational schools.

----

Libraries are in itself own big concept. Languages without libraries are bare, and, outside of curiosity, not practical. Very often knowing a language implies not only understanding of language grammar, but also it's libraries

You can think that libraries define half of what is considered programming language. For C++ you got STL/Boost. For Perl you got CPAN.

Kind regards

Adam Żochowski

Wow - great input. Thanks very much.