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Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

> Forget Codecademy

This. Getting everything installed and the environment configured is huge.

"Forget Codecademy" <- This isn't so simple.

You've gotta get started somewhere, and a safe place, in your browser, that doesn't require arduous setup ain't too shabby.

As Zack points out, there's a true difference between someone who "thinks they should code" and one who really wants it. Codecademy welcomes all comers, so it's hard to tell the difference. That shouldn't necessarily be an indictment those who start there.

At Thinkful (http://thinkful.com/) we send students to some Codecademy lessons, along with hundreds of hours of real-world projects and other resources.

I agree. Codecademy can be useful you just need to recognize its limitations.

Does Thinkful use mostly freely available sources from the web as a way have students learn the material?

We use a of free and paid – there's so much great stuff out there we generally find the value is in the filtering. That

There's some great CodeSchool work that we use and they're a paid source.

The projects and curriculum are all our own design.

I agree with the general idea, but think it can still serve benefits. From my own experience, Codecademy can be good training wheels but you have to go outside of it--essentially use it as a tool to know what's out there to play around with.

I agree with the rest of it, but would also add that in addition to writing out code, take notes, too. This can be alongside the code you just wrote or somewhere else, but take notes somewhere. This has a couple benefits: it usually means that you'll have to read an article or watch a video twice, plus it allows you think about what code is doing. Even if you're taking the advice to write out code, it's easy to gloss over that part.

This needs to be a service. It's such a huge fall off point for beginners

Totally agree. One-click interface to spin up an environment.

If not that, a collection of resources for each language so people aren't sent down rabbit holes where they have no idea what they're doing.

Rails Installer was pretty close to this.

action.io

Maybe devtable[1] could be extended in a way thats a little more bent towards code education.

[1] http://try.devtable.com/

I disagree.

Learning to set up your own environment builds tenacity. Having a one click install would take away from the learning experience and the beginner maybe more likely to quit if something breaks or goes wrong instead of googling around for a fix.

This.

Whenever I've hit challenges when learning to set up things (like recently making the move from Windows -> Linux and having to start from scratch with my dev environment) I've learned the most. Also, it teaches you that you've got the determination to succeed, which at some point you will need to be an effective programmer.

I learned that way. You need to think carefully about whether you really want to be weeding out people with insufficient tenacity at this early stage. I think there are a lot of people who, even if they're never software professionals, would benefit from a really easy-to-setup environment. There's plenty of time for playing with environments later, when they're better able to decide whether it's worth the trouble for them. Before they've got something running, a beginner doesn't know yet, and it makes little sense to deal with all the frustration on the slim chance they'll get something out of it.

Actually, though, Python is probably sufficient, especially with the nice-ish tools that come with it on Windows (nice-ish meaning less ugly than a cmd window).

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