71–80 of 85 posts
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It doesn't go back, it actually deletes the page from the internet. Since the page has been trashed, the only logical result is to take you back one history state. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Whatever it does, it causes lots of totally unexpected data loss.
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one of those teams picked a bad name, given the obvious and inevitable confusion it would cause.
The name was a bad choice. But they also have http://www.codeacademy.com which redirects to codecademy.com
This online tutorial grossly overestimates how much the layperson understands about computer languages. For the complete beginner, far too much is left unexplained. No one actually codes using a REPL in a browser. Yet the site makes no attempt to explain why or how this REPL exists, or how it works. It doesn't explain why I can only type in certain places on the screen. It doesn't explain how to try again, or undo mi…
The idea of adding buckets of complexity by beginning with questions like "what is a REPL", "how does the code turn into action?", "how is my message getting to this site?" kind of takes all the fun and exploration out of the experience.
As a programmer I dislike magic, I have to know what's happening under the hood. But had I kept asking why, I'd be studying electronics and electricity at the moment.
The trust in the existing infrastructure has to begin somewhere, and I think the quick feedback from a REPL is a great learning tool. It whets the appetite, and students can then expand their circle of knowledge over time.
Imagine if you had to understand E=mc^2 before being allowed to appreciate the night sky ;)
I was a complete beginner at coding a few months ago. I really really wanted to learn, so I've tried going to local meetups designed to teach newbies to code and I've tried Codecademy. The problem I found was this tendency to start with the terminal as the teaching tool. The terminal is a black and intimidating hole to a beginner. Sure, I happily typed in 2+2 and got 4 as a result, and I understood how to store varia…
It used to be that terminal was the standard when it came to learning ones first language (think BASIC in most of computers in 80s).
EDIT: I wanted to criticize the choice of learning programming by starting with something as unwieldy and bloated as Eclipse and Java.
My mind changed, as I read about Karel language. Starting with a simple language that can actually do something then gradually building up is great for learning.
However, one point still stands, BASIC was basically one level down the abstraction from machine code, while Karel is now four levels down. This is the inevitable price of progress just like we can't build a toaster completely from scratch(http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...).
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Thanks for the comments. I'm the cofounder of Codecademy - we're working to alleviate all of these issues. We do lots of user testing and have surfaced many of these problems on our own. Additionally, we make an effort to simplify a lot of concepts and ease users into them instead of explaining them immediately. We've noticed lots of users actually struggle when deciding what IDE or text editor to download. The REPL…
You should show solutions in video form so the users can see what they should have done.
I made my (non-programming) girlfriend try codecademy and she had the same kind of troubles. I had to go at lengths to explain to her what a console was. She also told me that codecademy assumes too much stuff is known, like booleans or whatever. All the things that we take for granted and innate are extremely complicated to teach through a human-computer interaction. In the end she went and googled "javascript tutor…
Slightly offtopic: I also have a non-programming girlfriend and she recently expressed an interest in learning what programming is all about. This is because she often sees me coding, knows that I like it and that it's a big part of my life, and feels bad when I start talking about how I started some new project and she knows that I cannot tell her in detail what it's about because she wouldn't understand me (I ususa…
I can't imagine this would be productive. What's the point of learning OO stuff if you aren't actually going to be writing programs big enough to warrant it right away? Get started with the smallest part of of the joy of programming: write some code and see it do something, even "10 print hi goto 10" is going to be a lot more exciting than OO, I would think.
I remember fooling with tiny BASIC etc as a young man. It was weird and wonderful. Nothing worked right; everything was a maze and a puzzle. I wouldn't have missed that for the world.
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The name was a bad choice. But they also have http://www.codeacademy.com which redirects to codecademy.com
I seem to remember codeacademy being owned by someone else, a squatter or an entrepreneur who hadn't got around to doing tomething with it. If I do in fact remember this correctly, one explanation would be that they bought that domain after they'd received more investment money than they started out with.
tl;dr - I think I fixed this problem in my app (iheartpy.com) using AIML. Caution: Still a work in progress. The whoe thing - I am a self-taught programmer. And I had been an extensive user of codeacademy myself. I realized this rather serious design flaw early on and tried to do something about it. Initially, I tried to right my own engine based on JSON but midway I discovered AIML. It suited the task perfectly. So…