Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad for all the people in this thread, for whom Codecademy worked, but I strongly suspect it worked for them because of their drive, and not because of the quality of Codecademy.

~1 year ago I pointed some friends that wanted to learn Python towards Codecademy (because it's just the most prominent example of it's kind of platform). Just out of curiosity, I looked over their shoulders, and I'm glad I did.

From what I could the tell the course offered very little beyond a Python REPL in terms of guidance. It didn't teach the difference between a variable name `foo` and a string `"foo"` (one of the most common struggles for newbies), at a point in the course where it assumed that knowledge to complete a step. And all it gave as feedback were bad error messages (IIRC 1:1 the one of the Python interpreter, which are very hard to interpret for newcomers). I was baffled that the flagship learn-to-code-platform had that level of quality after ~10 years of operation.

I've never use codeacademy, but with exercism and the like the exercises are all very much "puzzles" rather than actual software engineering challenges. I want to see database problems, architectural questions, networking, reverse engineering, security concepts, API authoring, etc.

So as you describe, they're not great for starting out with programming, and for advanced programmers, string manipulation exercises just don't teach you anything.

Are you aware of any online courses that teach these things?

There are plenty of video courses, stuff on Udemy teaching you databases, etc.

I think it's an untapped market for the webbased coding challenges, although quite hard to pull off if you are needing to have a database for the users to interact with, etc. The same would apply for any network-based challenge, or ones requiring interacting with an API, etc.

If you've ever played with HackTheBox / TryHackMe (hacking playground) they provide VPN config details where you connect and can access all sorts of services, DBs etc to hack.

I imagine a similar solution could work for coding, networking etc training.

Yeah I have, and they're really good. We need something similar for software engineering.

HN: make it so!

For me codecademy broke down stuff into easy steps but went into depth eventually. What I started to dislike about codecademy is that they are eventually dumbing down their lessons. There used to be comprehensive Javascript course, which they retired. That course went into details about prototype, inheritance chain and other things like that. Instead they released a course that doesn't even acknowledges that part of JS, just shows to make a class with ES6+.

Although I still think services like Codeacademy and Exercism are really useful, what you've said describes my main gripe with them, which is that these services are seemingly designed for people who have already maneuvered their way into programming to some extent. Someone who wants to learn programming from scratch probably won't get much out of having a "hello world" exercise thrown at them followed by FizzBuzz. Not only does the value of such exercises not necessarily translate to someone who has yet to fool with computers themselves, but these systems overall fail to educate new programmers on the many things that matter besides language constructs for a particular language. In my opinion, these are tools designed by programmers for programmers. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but not once have I become proficient in a language by doing online code challenges in a REPL; I always learn by doing, as was recently the case for me delving into C++ via an Arduino project. The C++ skills I momentarily learned online didn't stick because FizzBuzz isn't really applicable to anything (obviously I'm kind of oversimplifying things here).

I was baffle the first time I realised differentiating a variable from string was a thing for beginners, but it's true, a lot struggle with it at start...

In my experience code highlighting that differentiates strings helps a lot to create intuition for this.

Ten years ago when I tried it, it was the closest I as a non-coder ever come to a REPL. Thanks to Codecademy I got my start and learned I can do it. It’s been my career since. So for it’s audience (me ten years ago) it ain’t bad. Nothing was as inviting as approachable.

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