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rozap  ·  4450 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Code Academy - Learning to Code Interactively

I'm a little skeptical about this approach. The idea here is to dump people into a massively useful and widely adopted environment (Javascript + the web) which is great, but with that comes a great deal of complexity. There is really a lot to digest, and the oddities and exceptions are overwhelming for a beginner. Doing this overlooks some of the more basic building blocks of programming, which are extremely valuable when you're learning. By building blocks I mean thinking about data, how to structure programs, how to think about problems, etc, rather than "What's the syntax for making a blue square?"

Disclaimer: the first programming course I took was an irl version of this course so my view is almost certainly one sided.