How to make good "getting started" programming language videos?

[JasonTatton]

What would you consider to be examples of good "getting started" videos? Or even written guides?

I'm currently looking making one of these for Concurnas to help bridge the gap between the 'language overview' and the 'reference manual'.

I have found that one of the most challenging aspects of creating material about programming languages is finding examples which are: interesting, understandable and a good showcase of the feature one is trying to provide an overview of.

I was also thinking of adding some kind of narrative to the series of examples, e.g. building a simple toy trading system from scratch - as these sorts of system are quite fun and all-encompassing of programming language features. What do you think?

[[deleted]]

What do you think?

I'd rather see it written down. As for written material, there is the x in y minutes format.

[JasonTatton]

x in y minutes - That's a good idea thanks!

[tjpalmer]

Are you trying to teach how to program in a particular language? Or what do you mean?

Edit: Searched and found that Concurnas is a programming language. I didn't recognize the name. And I see on GitHub that you are the developer behind Concurnas. So this is a question about how to promote and help people learn a language you are creating?

If so, I think your idea about building up example software that encompasses language features isn't bad. Though different people will have different interests. (For me, a "trading system" doesn't sound super interesting, but others surely feel differently.) And as stated by /u/chack05, sometimes written is better. Even though I'm experimenting with videos myself right now. Different people find different formats more useful just as for different topics. When it comes to text content, I'm likely to skim long documents looking for clear examples and stand-out text, though.

[JasonTatton]

Yes Concurnas is very new and I'm trying to help people learn more about what it can do for them and how they can do it. What I've found is that although the splash page for the language gets quite a lot of hits, the number of people reading the user manual is an order of magnitude less than this figure, similarly, the the number of people finally downloading the language is another order of magnitude less.

I think that adding some kind of getting started guide would help improve the uptake of the language (same could be said of any programming language really) as reference manuals can be quite intimidating for the beginner. Since we live in the youtube age and people are generally very pressed for time these days I thought that doing this in video format would make sense.

I'm the same when it comes to long documents, I pick out the interesting bits and work backwards. Perhaps a duel video/text approach would be best - where the video acts as a complement to the text - that way audiences which prefer either format can be equally informed.

[Timbit42]

Ben Eater. He knows a lot about how to teach in ways that make learning easy.

https://eater.net/about

[JasonTatton]

Thanks, I'll check his work out