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Just a quick correction to your comment - they are CodeCademy www.codecademy.com, not Code Academy www.codeacademy.org
one of those teams picked a bad name, given the obvious and inevitable confusion it would cause.
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…
> Coding is best learned "the hard way". Funny. There is a series of books by Zed shaw called "Learn 'x' the Hard Way". The books tells you to type things first; the explanation comes later. In my experience, the most important part of learning to program is that you can do something fun, quickly. If you enjoy the programming, you will continue with it, and then bother to learn the "why"'s. If you don't find it fun,…
One example is the popularity of Stanford Professor Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class. The course is almost entirely top-down, with concepts, then trying out basic code, then finally learning some of the Math behind the algorithms. But people have definitely been able to learn from the course-I remember seeing an HN post about a guy who built a self-driving RC car using the algorithms in the ML course.
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…
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…
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…