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Comment by maximusprime | Hacker News Reader

Everyone already has a browser, which includes a profiler, debugger, REPL etc.

Not everyone has a c compiler or JDK, or wants the hassle of having to set them up just to start learning.

The claim that everyone has a profiler, debugger and REPL is blatantly false. Only a subset of commonly available desktop browsers include those features, and out of those, only recent versions do. Mobile web browsers don't include any development or debugging tools.

The cost of installing Visual Studio or Eclipse is pretty small considering that you only have to do it once. Compare that with the cost a newbie programmer pays every time they use the comparison operator or the arithmetic operator and they now have to consult their reference text to figure out what the operator is going to do and whether they're using the right operator.

If your goal is to lead someone into a lifetime of programming and help them enjoy it, choosing a language in order to avoid a pesky 15 minute setup cost for a compiler is tremendously short-sighted.

    > Mobile web browsers don't include any development or
      debugging tools.

LOL. Great point. /sarcasm

    > The cost of installing Visual Studio or Eclipse is
      pretty small considering that you only have to do it
      once.

Boom. That's all it takes to create a barrier of entry. Not everyone has permissions to install whatever they want on the computer they're using.

Then you get into issues with multiple operating systems. Windows does it one way and Linux and OSX does it another way. Also, the tools you've mentioned are always changing. Will it be the same in a year or two?

And for what? So you don't confuse an extra set of comparison operators? Javascript is not that bad.

Boom. That's all it takes to create a barrier of entry. Not everyone has permissions to install whatever they want on the computer they're using.

But won't they need to install an editor anyways? Or are they just going to use notepad? That will be a horrible experience.

And JS is changing too. None of the languages change so drastically that it's not just something simple to incrementally learn. And I think getting students used to the fact that things change isn't a bad thing. But also let them know that typically backwards compat isn't broken with these changes.

With that said I'm a big fan of JS as a first language. I'd probably spend the first day with them using notepad or vi (or whatever is natively installed on the system) -- and then have them install some nice IDE of my choosing.

I'm all for vim, but you're mad if you think first-time coders should pick that up before even writing their first piece of code. Talk about barriers to entry and unintuitive behaviors...

I think the most viable environments for absolute beginners will be online ones that include an REPL and editor, using either JS or something that compiles to JS or to anything else on the backend, so even browser choice is irrelevant. Then you don't have to teach how to load a JS file into a document and so on.

Khan Academy is a training/teaching company. I don't think it's a leap to assume they will be providing online tools to write code with (eg http://c9.io/).

I would find it hard to believe that even a significant minority of users who would have any remote or even fleeting interest in programming anything would have a mobile web browser as their only choice. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has a smartphone or tablet but not a computer.

I struggle with this mindset. It probably makes sense for Khan Academy, but this industry (software development) needs fewer people who refuse to learn anything unless all obstacles are removed and the information is spoon fed.

Well, I grew up in a day when it was even easier.

  * Buy home computer (ZX81)
  * Turn on
  * 10 Print "Hello world"
  * run

I don't think the instant gratification and ease of use did me any harm.

Of course, the "buy home computer" step was a lot harder back in those days.

More expensive? Sure.

Less common? Definitely.

Harder? Not all that much.

It wasn't. At least in the UK in the 80s, you could go out to any town center, walk into a shop, and buy a "home" computer. They were everywhere.

Right the technical stack has become daunting to the point that many cannot get the feedback so needed early on. Now days you either advanced with the technology, or you spent a significant investment of time to learn the trade with the intent of entering the field. The days of the hobbyist programmer have seen their peek until that changes.

I find your statement to be amusing considering a lot of the anti-JS comments on this thread are about how unwieldy it is as a language. Of course, your critique and those complaints are two different things. You are criticizing that people are too coddled about having an accessible environment to program in. The complaints are that JS is too unfriendly and muddled, and so does not coddle beginners enough!

Installing the required tools to use a programming language is a very different kind of challenge than learning the ins and outs of a programming language with lots of gotchas.

When you work as a software engineer, you're expected to be able to install and operate just about any programming environment out there, so you might as well get used to it. Installing any of the big popular programming environments is pretty trivial, Eclipse, Visual studio, Racket scheme, Ubuntu and even the Haskell platform all come with a graphical installer and a comprehensive manual. Learning a new skill is not needed.

Now learning JavaScript wtf's is something entirely different. Stumbling upon one of these issues mentioned in the article while trying to learn to code is very difficult and disheartening.

Once someone has decided that they absolutely want to learn everything there is to know about programming and have decided that they love it, yes, there's no point in spoon feeding. But so many of us stumble into what later ends up being our career or passion, and so our first encounter with any type of activity is almost always "hey, let's see if this is something for me." As a society, we need more programmers and scientists and mathematicians, so best make sure that we make that first impression a good one.

That's fine. We can already run lots of better languages in the browser either using interpreters written in JS or cross-compilers targeting JS.

This is an eminently solvable problem. There are excellent open source IDEs and toolchains available that can be repackaged in any way, shape, or form.

Double click an installer, and boom - everything's set up.

Barrier to entry is a moot point.

Almost everything comes with installer these days, yet some refused to install better, secure browsers since they already have IE by default.

Barrier of entry is a problem.

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