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Ben Adrian Sarmiento
Ben Adrian Sarmiento

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Starting something new for 2020

Recently, or just yesterday, I thought of making a video tutorial about programming. My wife has been pushing me to make a podcast (with her) but I can't really think of good topics we can enjoy discussing to make it a fun listen. Programming has been my passion and career so I thought why not do that instead and be informative. She's currently in a different country though, plus I am really bad at explaining in just words. So video it is. And just me.

After having a discussion with her, we thought teaching the basics (the right basics) first just for the curious people who want to learn programming will do. I am not really aiming for anything here and this is just my outlet to when I am alone and want to pass the time.

Why Svelte? I am aware that Svelte is not being taught at all in any schools as an introductory language. Maybe most schools might not even know something like Svelte exists. But I chose Svelte because of 2 things: first, web is the best platform to program for. Web is where you see everything converge. Your laptop, phone, everything is connected to the web. Everyone uses Google or Facebook. Second, Svelte is a lot simpler than Python if you know a bit already about HTML (and other web technologies). With Python you have to learn the language, and work on the command line. If you're just curious to know what programming is, learning something simpler but still something that can be a lot productive is a better approach.

So what is Svelte actually? Is it a new language? Yes and no. Yes because it needs its own compiler to work. It's built on top of JavaScript and HTML (no it didn't add anything to CSS… yet). Your old JavaScript and HTML codes will still work. But your Svelte code might not work (as you've expected) as just plain HTML and JavaScript without compiling it (with Svelte). And no because I still write valid JavaScript and HTML, and only for the UI-related behavior you write Svelte-only code (so you could say it's just a framework like React).

So that's my opinion of Svelte. If you think you don't agree that this is a good language to teach programming basics, let me know. For professionals out there, if I got you curious about Svelte, please check out Sapper. My ongoing video series can be seen here.

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