pgbovine

That's exactly the point of these workshops -- to teach librarians, research assistants, scientists, and other sorts of professionals to become more productive via programming. Real-world tasks for them often involve knowing about and manipulating the filesystem (hence command-line craziness), coordination and typesetting (hence Git / LaTeX), and data analysis and visualization (hence Python/JS/d3/etc.). And these folks were motivated to learn to hopefully help their careers. The teachers also had the best possible attitude and patience that I had seen, and yet still there was this schism, which I wrote about.

completely agreed, but often the first example you show people needs to be simple enough to grok, not to mention to type. even showing a simple git example takes about an hour to account for typos, environmental mismatches, etc. showing a forking-diff-diffing-fork-merging-rebase-rebasing-merge-pulling-clone-while-solving-two-generals-problem-without-paxos will make people's heads explode. and first impressions often matter, for better or worse.

this is exactly what a newbie would see if they opened up a built-in text editor on, say, their mac. something similar would happen for windows. (same goes for lack of fancy terminal customizations.)

getting a syntax-highlighting editor is an extra installation step that can take hours to set up and explain in a class, due to people's different environmental setups. e.g., someone has some obscure virus checker installed that prevents gVim or Emacs or Sublime Text or whatever from installing, or crashes on startup.

edit: also, it's putting lipstick on a porcine. the code examples i've shown will be equally cryptic to a beginner even with syntax highlighting.

Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes. also untrue; googlers are mostly evaluated on quantifiable impact on products, not by their academic research publications. they are explicitly not an academic lab. for details, see:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Some of my college classmates went down this route, and while the numbers can theoretically work out (these are uber-smart math/science/engineering folks), I've never seen a single person exit successfully from this game and then unicorn it. The main reason seems to be that they can't fight off the inevitable lifestyle inflation that comes with being in such a social circle. The last I heard from one guy, he was paying almost $10,000 a month to maintain two apartments in Manhattan ...

"He was employed by Google from 2005 until December 7th 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language."

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/sigcse/basics.pdf

but if you want to get a well-paying job period that doesn't involve your dissertation work, then there are far more options. in fact, the best paying jobs out of Ph.D. are those that have nothing to do with your dissertation work (e.g., finance, engineering at top firms such as Google/Facebook/etc., management consulting).

(also, my first job out of grad school was in industry and had nothing to do with my Ph.D. work)

the ONLY enduring downside (which you mentioned) is the lost income.

see: http://vimeo.com/73178238

also check out jeff's related post on bringing startup culture to academic research! http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_resear...

btw i'm a big fan of jeff's approach and hope it works out well.

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/15944853...

but all snark aside, good work so far! like the concept.

YMMV, though.