Yeah, why is awesome. I miss him!

Yeah, like Lowry, I got lost with ruby pretty quickly. One big hurdle (in my opinion) is setting up a "ruby environment" to work in. It feels really vague and difficult to me.

You have to buy instapaper? The app, I'm guessing? I've only used the site.

This kind of goes with what @ROM writes, but one problem with learning programming today is that a lot of courses bombard you with so much unnecessary information from the get go.

Does someone need to learn their way around entire frameworks, debuggers, and GUI toolkits with 30,000 things to click on? No.

Just let the untrained masses fire up Windows Notepad, write three lines of code, click "save", run it...and feel the joy.

ROM, yeah, the app lets you save stuff from your browser to your phone. It's really handy and well designed.

@HUMANCLOCK: I FIRST LEARNED WEBDESIGN WAY BACK IN THE 90'S DOING THAT. THROW TOGETHER SOME BODY TAGS AND SHIT AND LOAD IT IN NETSCAPE AND TA-FUCKING-DA! A WEBPAGE.

@Graham

But you forgot how it would look different in IE, so you didn't know if the problem was you or the browser!

Yeah, in 1997 I once wrote an entire 60k perl script using windows notepad, and had no access to the server error logs. and testing of a 28.8 modem. Those were the days.

I think JavaScript would make a good entry language-- even though it's rife with pitfalls in its implementation-- but it's full featured, simple, readable, object-oriented or procedural, and everyone has a web browser. No "environment" needed. It's even easier if you go with Firefox + Firebug, since you can see results right away.

My entry language, though, was probably HyperTalk. Good times.