Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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This post is a lot of fearmongering, and I don't really understand where it's coming from. Yes, installing Python is marginally harder than installing, say, Discord or Steam. Why is that an issue? Up-and-coming programmers are going to have to face much bigger issues than what version of Python their running, and letting them interact with it firsthand is always a more educational experience than abstracting it away and telling them not to worry about it.

> it's pretty hard to realize just how confused people can be.

It's good, though! Confusion is a sign that someone is confronting something they don't understand, which is an opportunity to teach them about what they're doing, or at least motivate them to understand it a little better.

I sympathize with people who want to promote a browser-based, sandboxed coding experience- I really do. Teaching people to code on it is a whole different story. Imagine what would happen if we raised a generation of Python scriptwriters who couldn't figure out how to install to PATH, or taught C without showing people the compiler. There's no excuse for not knowing how to operate your tools, and learning them first is an absolute must. You don't let someone start playing with a rotary saw until they know how to use it.

You make some strong points but I think the idea is if someone starts by diving right into code they’ll get to the point where they’ll feel inspired to deal with setting up an environment. Someone testing the water isn’t necessary ready for much hassles and they’re not yet all in.

Once they’re all in they’ll pull an all nighter if necessary to get something done.

To me it’s always been a balancing act.

Things like Repls often turned me off if they left me feeling like the things I was running in them were contrived and ephemeral.

Even if I was producing some cool graphic or something, there was always this nagging feeling that I wasn’t making something “real” that could be saved off and shared. Almost like the difference between messing around with a dry erase board vs learning how to draw with a pencil and a sketch pad.

But at the same time, PHP was instrumental to my learning how the web worked, in part because of how easy it was to find shared hosting that easily mapped PHP files to web routes 1:1. I can’t imagine I would have learned much if my first step was installing Apache, then mod PHP, then mod rewrite, then setting up htaccess files and directory permissions and then realizing that I didn’t get the PHP with GD graphics installed.

Maybe this is an “everyone learns differently” thing, or maybe this is a “the right answer is somewhere in the middle” thing.

There may not be as much of a balancing act.

The gap that needs to be minimized, I believe, is the gap between deciding to start and being able to produce actual usable stuff.

So, for example, the use of shared hosting that mapped PHP to web routes meant that you could get started and immediately create actual websites on the internet. Having to do that manually via setting up Apache, etc., makes that gap significantly larger.

OTOH, an online REPL lets you see the results of your code, but doesn’t actually let you create actual programs that you could use. Whereas setting up a local environment means that you can immediately create Python scripts that you can actually use.

An online REPL, in this way, only adds to the gap between someone deciding to start and creating real usable outputs.

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