The more I realize how much students struggle with setting up tooling for development, the more I start to wonder if we need to start focusing more on that instead of trying to skip it.
When I first starting programming a lot of my difficulty and frustration was trying to get my free copy of Borland Turbo C++ running. Once I got a bit older and started to learn Linux and more fundamental things about operating systems, programming became a much easier because the additional tooling steps were much easier.
EDIT: It's certainly possible tooling will soon become a thing of the past, but judging by the trends and past experience, I do start to wonder if it's time to expect it as a necessary evil and start to handle if head on as opposed to trying to avoid it.
Yes, I'm a cs professor and we just introduced an online, 1 credit "Software development tools" course for this reason. Students had so much trouble with this that it was really interfering with their course work.
Back in the old days, we'd have labs of computers with the software for the course pre-installed. Now that everyone has their own computer, I guess that doesn't make sense anymore, but software installation is still a problem.
At my university, some courses have started making virtual machines for students with all of the necessary software. This also turns out to be a problem because installing virtualbox or VMWare on a variety of laptops can be difficult for the course staff.
I totally agree. Even if we successfully build a future where we can have developers/designers jump right into their work without having to understand much about configuration/setup/etc we're still going to need people who do get it. This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.
> This is great for education but I wonder how often a student will decide they love programming (when it's set-up like this) and then realize they hate it when confronted with all different systems and set-ups you generally have to deal with in the real world.
Maybe we should be working to improve the dev environments in the "real world" so that programmers can focus on programming?
What I'd really like to see is a strong focus on making the the default experience decent so many people can avoid needing to tinker but having some obvious directions to look in when you realize that you've outgrown the defaults.
A small example I'd use is the way the Python infrastructure around the package installer (pip) has improved over the last couple of years. Experienced developers used to have a ~/.pip.conf to set defaults like caching, timeouts, failover, etc. but it was a perennial hassle for newcomers. Since then, a lot of time has gone into removing the needs for that config (e.g. adding a CDN, making caching better and enabling it by default, etc.) which saves time for newcomers and means that experienced developers can stop maintaining another dotfile.
I just linked this to my girlfriend who's going to her first HTML intro class tonight. Seeing the immediate results of your experiments is not only satisfying but highly productive. Installing code editors and "cryptic acronyms" is a deterrent to learning programming.
If you are struggling with getting your environment setup you need to take so and so class. There should be a class for just getting an environment setup and doing basic sys admin tasks.
If it wasn't for Thimble I would never have done anything locally. I wouldn't have been able to install Git.
I am an educator and a volunteer contributor to Mozilla Learning. I can honestly say that everything I have learned about HTML/CSS is due to using Thimble in my teaching for the last year and a half.
For my students, who are not in digital arts, computer science, or web design programs Thimble is a wonderful scaffold. This new version is even better.
If they get to the level where they are editing locally my students will now be able to download projects.
Agreed. Some of these tasks are things where it's reasonable to expect people to learn concepts or specific tools but in many cases it's still overhead even if people have learned coping strategies.
When I first starting programming a lot of my difficulty and frustration was trying to get my free copy of Borland Turbo C++ running. Once I got a bit older and started to learn Linux and more fundamental things about operating systems, programming became a much easier because the additional tooling steps were much easier.
EDIT: It's certainly possible tooling will soon become a thing of the past, but judging by the trends and past experience, I do start to wonder if it's time to expect it as a necessary evil and start to handle if head on as opposed to trying to avoid it.