Many people think programming is something boring that they shouldn't waste their time on. But why is that?
Common thoughts about programmers
I think the best way to start this is by giving an example of what a friend of mine once told me what she thought about programming(it's translated from german to english, so thats not exactly what she said).
"Why would anyone want to do that, you just sit there, write somethin in a language without proper grammar just to hack something or make a useless tool. It would take ages to be able to make something useful"
This got me thinking, where does this thought come from? But then it hit me, it may come from the way many people are taught how to programm.
For the ones who have not started yet, most starter programms look like this:
print("Hello World");This command just writes down the words Hello World and nothing else. I meen sure, anyone could do this, but it doesn't show the interesting parts of programming at all.
How we should go about learning / teaching how to code
For that, there are other options that are actually much more useful for showing, what you can do with very few lines of code. An example for this would be Scratch it's a tool for teaching kids how to programm using a block based system, this means, they dont have to write, but combine different events like button presses and loops, to make the ui on their right do something.
But this oviously can just be used for the beginning, if you want to get into realy writing the code something like arduinos would be great, as you`ll use pretty easy commands, to make an led on your device blink, these obviously cost money, but as they are realy cheap to get and realy usefull I would still recommend them.
Conclusion
So in the end we can say, that there are good ways to begin programming, but starting with code like "Hello World" in the Windows API will just make people bored, they'll need to see something happen when they execute their code. Even if it's just a blinking LED.