Build log/#003/Writing
Writing lesson one, eleven times
The first lesson is the whole product. Everything after it is easier.
Draft one explained what a program is. Draft four explained what a variable is. Draft seven explained what Python is. All of them were reasonable and all of them were wrong, because they were about us explaining rather than you doing.
Draft eleven starts with a line of code already on screen and asks you to change one word in it. You press run. Something different happens. That’s the lesson.
The explanation still exists — it just comes after, when you’ve already got a reason to care. It turns out that’s the whole trick, and it took us eleven tries to notice.
We’re now rewriting the next few lessons the same way: the smallest possible thing you can change, then the reason it worked.