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Comment by gecko | Hacker News Reader

Given that Khan is hosted entirely on App Engine, I wouldn't count on a Node.js-specific tutorial series starting any time soon, but JavaScript in general is possible.

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I don't see why our hosting choice has anything to do with the tutorial content, Señor Benjamin

Para enseñar se requiere de experiencia con lo que uno sabe. I assumed that the lack of experience with Node.js would at least somewhat preclude teaching its best usages.

On the other hand, what the fuck do I know. I'm a Smalltalk developer leading a .NET front-end to a Python project.

We miss you, kamens. :(

Your assumption was correct. And same to all of you.

Seriously. If you come back, I'll give you a Golden Retriever. And I promise it won't try to jump of any ledges.

It's not fun until you've broken some old lady's thumb. I wonder if this is deep enough in a comment thread for the downvoters to not punish me for an entirely worthless inside-joke comment.

That's what I'm banking on.

(The parent post is by the Khan Academy lead developer.)

True, but the great grandparent post is by an old friend -- and he's probably still right about node.js in the near future ;)

I may need to use http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2708222 to understand the relationships discussed here.

Glad someone chimed in, because i didnt have a clue who was what and what was who

Not only is Javascript possible, but its the simplest for average kid to start with. No download required. I love Eloquent JS for further study. Just browse the web and have an interactive tutorial that goes into pretty good depth.

And as someone noted, with Resig there, this is just a matter of time.

Designing with JavaScript by Nick Heinle was one of my first book purchases. I studied the crap out of it in middle school.

Javascript is great as intro. Kids are naturally drawn to shiny things and you can create plenty of shiny stuff with Javascript with minimal setup.

Once you hit the natural limit("how do I save the scores!"), you can move on to PHP/python etc.

It's cool that everyone has a JavaScript environment on their machines, but I think that if you want to learn programming downloading Python is not a problem.

JavaScript is great for me when friends ask me: "Hey you know programming right? Show me something on my computer" but if they want to learn programming, I'd just ask them to download Python or Ruby.

Honestly, for me, if they're interested in the web or hobby dev, I think JS is the better choice, even download aside. The path from HTML to JS to JQuery and CSS in there somewhere seems like a more useful path for most people nowadays. Once they get that, Ruby/Python will come relatively easy.

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