Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tiomaidh | Hacker News Reader

He's not upset about the filename-comment per se, he's worried that it's an early warning--it indicates that Khan isn't very experienced with software development (which, in my opinion, is a valid conclusion), and that that'll cause more serious problems in the future.

View on HN

Remember when people started slamming him for oversimplifying history, or getting other minor facts wrong on non-programming subjects? Everyone on HN just said "it's free, it's interesting, and who cares as long as students get the basic idea?"

Now that he's making minor mistakes on programming, HNers are upset he's not a software engineering expert.

I'm not being hypocritical: I think that he should start consulting experts for all his classes. I'd much rather have a site that crowdsources experts to teach topics than have one guy with a shallow depth of field on a lot of topics do it.

I'm willing to cut the guy a break. ;) However now that donations (I assume) are coming in, its probably about time to start consulting with experts before starting a class.

Willing to cut the guy a break, huh? How big of you.

Are you willing to actually do any work to improve it, or give a big cash grant so KhanAcademy.org can hire those professional programmers to help out?

Woosh.

Yes, its obvious that he hasn't written a lot of production code. Again, so what?. That's not in any way an early warning that he isn't capable of teaching basic programming skills to others.

exactly. if the viewers of these videos intend to become serious software developers then they can just correct whatever wrong shit they learn. if they don't care about best practices then it is still better that they know how to do the basics to automate mundane tasks then not know any at all.

Like what? (Seriously; more people getting interested in programming, candidates after Khan's video's somehow "slipping through" the interview process for a Jr position? Or, (where I can see your point), setting up bad practices?))

I don't know how much code Sal has written, but, depending on the project/coding standards, I've seen a lot of code with filename comments at the top. It's not really an indicator of experience or skill.

Yeah, that's an odd gripe. Check out code igniter for example. One ofthe popular php frameworks...filenames in comments.

I guess I can understand why people criticize Khan but it seems so wrong. Just pretend that khan is for the other 7 billion people!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com