I think it's great you're helping out people who want to learn with posts like this.<p>A couple critiques:
When I was first learning, I was desperate for Hello World code I could paste and run. As basic as this tutorial is, sometimes even a little abstraction makes it hard for newbies to grasp. For example, why not make the doWhatever function do something, so they can run the code and see how it works?<p>Same with assignment vs eval... demonstrate it in a fully functioning piece of code they can copy, paste and hack themselves.<p>Analogies to noble gases aren't the best... since non science people may not even remember what that is. Also, a can easily be changed, so I'm not sure the analogy even holds.<p>Nice post overall. I think Hacker news should have a way to easily find all articles like this.