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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, it's not anywhere on the page text but the <title> makes it clear: “for learners and educators”

This makes a TON of sense for those groups where someone doesn't spend half of their class time walking people through installing and configuring apps, dealing with whatever weird system customizations they've made, etc. Every time I've helped at a tutorial, that's been a big problem with some people never getting fully up and running in time.

Instead, it's “click this link” and you're actually in the class, with the ability to have pre-canned examples and starting points ready to go without also having to cover things like version control first.

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The more I realize how much students struggle with setting up tooling for development, the more I start to wonder if we need to start focusing more on that instead of trying to skip it.

When I first starting programming a lot of my difficulty and frustration was trying to get my free copy of Borland Turbo C++ running. Once I got a bit older and started to learn Linux and more fundamental things about operating systems, programming became a much easier because the additional tooling steps were much easier.

EDIT: It's certainly possible tooling will soon become a thing of the past, but judging by the trends and past experience, I do start to wonder if it's time to expect it as a necessary evil and start to handle if head on as opposed to trying to avoid it.

Yes, I'm a cs professor and we just introduced an online, 1 credit "Software development tools" course for this reason. Students had so much trouble with this that it was really interfering with their course work.

Back in the old days, we'd have labs of computers with the software for the course pre-installed. Now that everyone has their own computer, I guess that doesn't make sense anymore, but software installation is still a problem.

At my university, some courses have started making virtual machines for students with all of the necessary software. This also turns out to be a problem because installing virtualbox or VMWare on a variety of laptops can be difficult for the course staff.

I totally agree. Even if we successfully build a future where we can have developers/designers jump right into their work without having to understand much about configuration/setup/etc we're still going to need people who do get it. This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.

> This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.

Maybe we should be working to improve the dev environments in the "real world" so that programmers can focus on programming?

What I'd really like to see is a strong focus on making the the default experience decent so many people can avoid needing to tinker but having some obvious directions to look in when you realize that you've outgrown the defaults.

A small example I'd use is the way the Python infrastructure around the package installer (pip) has improved over the last couple of years. Experienced developers used to have a ~/.pip.conf to set defaults like caching, timeouts, failover, etc. but it was a perennial hassle for newcomers. Since then, a lot of time has gone into removing the needs for that config (e.g. adding a CDN, making caching better and enabling it by default, etc.) which saves time for newcomers and means that experienced developers can stop maintaining another dotfile.

I just linked this to my girlfriend who's going to her first HTML intro class tonight. Seeing the immediate results of your experiments is not only satisfying but highly productive. Installing code editors and "cryptic acronyms" is a deterrent to learning programming.

I really believe that it should be:

If you are struggling with getting your environment setup you need to take so and so class. There should be a class for just getting an environment setup and doing basic sys admin tasks.

If it wasn't for Thimble I would never have done anything locally. I wouldn't have been able to install Git.

I am an educator and a volunteer contributor to Mozilla Learning. I can honestly say that everything I have learned about HTML/CSS is due to using Thimble in my teaching for the last year and a half.

For my students, who are not in digital arts, computer science, or web design programs Thimble is a wonderful scaffold. This new version is even better.

If they get to the level where they are editing locally my students will now be able to download projects.

Agreed. Some of these tasks are things where it's reasonable to expect people to learn concepts or specific tools but in many cases it's still overhead even if people have learned coping strategies.

As someone who has taught JavaScript workshops in which 10% of the class wasted half the class trying to install Node & NPM just to set up a development server that could reliably serve static assets (the last thing I expected to be a problem), I can attest to the value of this.

Granted, plnkr.co probably would have worked just as well, but giving everybody a consistent (and persistent, and reasonably performant) dev environment in an educational setting makes a huge difference.

>> Sadly, it's not anywhere on the page text but the <title> makes it clear: “for learners and educators”

It is right on the front page: "Thimble is an online code editor that makes it easy to create and publish your own web pages while learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript."

The text of the <title> element is not present anywhere on the page, even though there's plenty of room in the logo at the top element to expand it.

The “while learning” bit is a nice nod in that direction but it's in de-emphasized text at the end of a block (the only other text that small is the login link in the upper corner). Given the number of people who didn't get why the project exists at first, I would suggest that it should be more prominent. This could be as simple as changing the highlighted text “Write the Web On the Web” title to “Learn to Write the Web On the Web” so it doesn't give the impression that this is intended to be a general-purpose editor.

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