A modern HelloWorld!
How I use it to learn any language.
We’ve all been there… well us programmers anyway have. You’re learning to program or learning a new language and you rush to Google. Chances are you type one of two things: “Simple <insert language here> tutorial” or “<insert language here> Hello World”.
Most likely, if you entered the first sentence you’ve ended up at the same location as the second. The famous Hello World tutorial serves as the go to technique when introducing any computer programming language.
I really liked this idea when I started learning to write code. It told me that if I could get this string to output, then that means I was able to compile the code (if necessary) and that once I learned how to create and manipulate data. I would be able to output and pass around objects, suddenly languages didn’t seem all that hard.
Todays problem
Returning a string doesn’t quite give me the confidence in a language that it did 8 years ago. Apps like Instagram, Shopify, and Rdio doing amazing things that seem very complex is intimidating.
So I asked myself: If I created Rdio tomorrow in a language I don’t know, what’s the first thing I need to code? I need a point of entry for my users with authentication, and a common way to handle that now is with social-sign-ins.
Todays solution
So I decided that for my version of HelloWorld to make me feel comfortable in a new language, I need to complete a basic interface (a button) that when clicked will make the request to authenticate with Twitter and then return back the newly auth’d users profile. It sounds like a lot, and once it’s done it seems like a fair chunk to have done. The awesome part is that its simple to do, it also gets you to the point where you have a controller interfacing with a view, you are utilizing an SDK/API, and you’re right in a good area to interface with a database.
Hopefully this proves to be an easy entrance for others into any language they want to dive into.
