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Comment by aleksiy123 | Hacker News Reader

There is one more point I would like to add to the "less friction to start." This is the killer feature for education.

No more do students have to set up their own envs. Figure out PYTHONPATH. No more do educators need to debug installation issues on 3 different OSes.

Teachers distribute a pre setup env which they know works for what they are trying to teach. Students go straight into writing code and building things with minimum friction.

Learning to set up your env can be punted to a problem for later.

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Learning to set up my environment to compile my first MUD back in 1999 was my first introduction to Autotools, ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to solve the problem because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure someone will say I'm gatekeeping, but seriously these low-level skills have served me my entire career, and I wonder what happens when every dev environment is just a docker pull away. Who learns how to build new environments?

That said, I have recently been tinkering with the Flipperzero firmware, and compared to the old Rockbox days when you had to install an arm-elf-gcc toolchain yourself and pray, embedded development has gotten way easier and this doesn't seem like a bad thing. I don't have an answer, just something to think about!

>Who learns how to build new environments?

Feels like this is happening already. There is no incentive to learn the fundamental concepts. We need more people interested in the why, and not just a quick buck. Folks interested in the why is the only reason we are here to begin with!

On the other hand....it's great job security! Less and less people understand networking everyday it seems!

In my experience, "tinkering" with an environment before getting any code working was a recipe for believing "this is too hard, maybe I'm not smart enough to do this".

Getting a feedback loop early on is so important. Once you're convinced that you can write software, setting up an environment starts to look like a tractable problem.

The kinds of things people are talking about - fiddling with autotools or PYTHONPATH - are not “fundamental concepts” or “the why” behind anything. It’s just tedious, boring nonsense. There are plenty of intellectually curious people who would be turned off by this stuff.

I agree.

Think of it like a product funnel. If the goal is to get people to learn X, making them learn Y as a barrier first is unnecessary. You risk people abandoning the funnel that way. It's still entirely possible to learn these tools some other way.

Yes, but if learning X beforehand required learning Y, then we might be expecting the value of learning X to be the combined value of learning X + Y.

It should be noted when adopting this approach, that you're lowering the expected value from the people who make it through the funnel. This may be counteracted by more people making it through the funnel, or it may not. The delta in total value is completely unknown.

Those who make it through the funnel with only X are likely more than the X+Y scenario simply because it's less learning and new concepts so drop out will be reduced. This cohort are probably more likely to go on to learn Y if we further assume it was so valuable as to have been "required". In reality requiring X+Y backfires as step 1 because X is all they want and X may be worth 10Y to the student at step 1. The value of Y may increase to >X after learning X.

When I learned basic HTML, CSS and JS. On step 1, JS had essentially no value. CSS sounded like it had value but was a bit nebulous and optional sounding. HTML seemed like an obvious requirement for building a website, so that's where I started. Once I learned HTML, the value of CSS became obvious and I pursued it. JS still seemed esoteric but later once I got HTML/CSS down and wanted to do more JS kept coming up as the solution. So I learned it too. Now, I'd say JS is way more valuable to me than HTML/CSS even though I learned it last.

This was in the 90s BTW and the path wasn't very clear back then. The first book I bought was actually a Perl book and quickly realized it was too advanced of a place for me to start. I learned about Perl after noticing the /cgi-bin/ portion of URLs and wondering what that meant. It had to be something most sites where doing similarly. This was before Google so whatever random SE I used back then told me cgi-bin was associated with Perl scripting for web development. I continued to struggle with the backend stuff (JS was FE only back then) until PHP3 came around. I'm self taught if that wasn't clear.

I mean, if you're self taught, you can take whatever path you want.

My comment was in the context of students, which generally is backed by public funding. I'm worried about getting less value for the same number of public dollars. That being said, maybe it does still work out as an increase in total value, we should probably do a study on that.

That being said, I'm self-taught too, so I actually benefit if these classes provide less value, as it's easier to convince business folks to hire me instead, but it's the principal of the matter in this case (also I'm not really competing against recent college grads anymore).

I think the problem here is ordering. At the end we probably want them to know X and Y but we would rather they learn X then Y.

But to learn X they need to do some steps from Y.

If we can remove those steps we can make more people learn both.

But also in practice I don't think anyone struggling to set up their env before writing a line of code is learning much. They are just following arcane instructions until it works.

Learn how to deploy your app before you write it or learn how to write your app before you deploy it...

Guess what, if there is nothing to deploy then learning how to deploy is just a waste of time.

> wonder what happens when every dev environment is just a docker pull away

They learn later, when/if they actually need it. And for those who turn out to be unwilling or unable, well, there wasn't much chance they'd have taken the same path as you, anyway.

Speaking of paths, specifically path dependence, autotools and friends really are monstrosities and should rightfully be relegated to history. I hope that simpler, easier environment building really are the future, as you hinted.

In my experience, it would become "You're not allowed to deviate from the standard environment" lol.

If they're so helpless they can't figure out how to even get to an environment other than their corporate standard one, then they have, again, already exited the pipeline before this conversation becomes relevant. Someone incapable of setting up a linux vm was never going to do original ops work, regardless of what the computing ecosystem around them looks like.

Its not necessarily gatekeeping, its just assuming that all others who come through are also motivated in the same way you are. Reality is that the same experience likely discouraged countless others and prevented them from pursuing development.

I'm the same as you, but I recognize not everyone is.

Meanwhile I'm here completely able to build basically anything from source but for some reason unable to understand docker at all.

> Autotools, ./configure, make, etc. I was motivated to solve the problem because I wanted to tinker. I'm sure someone will say I'm gatekeeping, but seriously these low-level skills have served me my entire career

What skills? 95% of using autotools etc. is tedious memorization or copy-paste, not something you learn anything useful from.

> No more do students have to set up their own envs.

That straight up sounds dystopian though. Speaking as someone who makes software for Linux machines, I'd really hate to hire someone that doesn't know how to play around with the OS side of things.

Handing someone a pre-built dev environment and playing god with them sounds like a great way to get stupid programmers who can't architect.

Check out Repit.com. They’ve added the ability to add dependencies. Having an easy way to hack on some Java with Maven dependencies already installed is pretty great.

I think this is possible using GitHub Codespaces as well…if you have a Java project with a Maven POM, the deps in the POM will get loaded at runtime.

I haven’t tried Python yet, but would imagine it’s similar. It’s all containerized, so you effectively have CI/CD you just don’t see it.

link: https://replit.com/

As in "REPL it", Read Eval Print Loop :)

> There is one more point I would like to add to the "less friction to start." This is the killer feature for education

So now the children have 2 entities spying on them: the school and the cloud provider.

Huh? It's not like the children aren't using Google and Microsoft services by the truckload already. Every single one has Android/iOs phone. They use Gmail and YouTube and browse the web. And the schools use it too - MS Windows, Office, Google Classroom, Drive... Practically nothing changes with a cloud desktop.

You mean a fully locked down device that allows no tinkering at all. Then they graduate to college and they're again suggested to use a fully locked down environment with no tinkering at all.

Can't speak about Apple devices but there's more than enough tinkering available on Android.

Teacher here. This is absolutely correct. I can't imagine teaching CS, especially at a high school level without Replit.

The flip side of this is that it's hard to do anything beyond the standard library for some languages. Using PythonAnywhere is great for std-in/std-out programs, but I couldn't figure out a way to import graphics libraries and such. The web is pretty limiting when teaching with anything other than JS/HTML/CSS.

env management is pretty easy considering tools like conda are out there, that will carry you pretty far especially in terms of education. you could create a conda env specific for your class and just email the yaml. its also easy to write a script that will install miniconda and build these needed environments

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