[sanderjd]

That doesn't sound silly at all. In fact what sounds silly is taking techniques designed for large professional software projects and applying them to things that aren't anything of the sort.

It reminds me of the problem with teaching Java as a first language – you must start with `public class Foo` in a file called `Foo.java`, containing a method declared as `public static void main(String[] args)`, which means you must either explain tons of concepts (what "class" means, what "public" means, what "static" means, etc.) long before you can motivate any of them, which makes everything seem complicated and hard, or hand-wave them away as incantations that you'll learn about in due time, which makes programming seem magical and mysterious.

None of which is to say that Java isn't a great language for doing professional work, just that it isn't great to start with. Git seems quite similar to me.

On the other hand, I get that it is valuable to teach techniques that will actually be useful to students in their professional life, even if they are clumsy in a non-professional setting. There's a real tension here.

Apropos of nothing else I wrote: I've always enjoyed seeing people alias `blame` as `praise` or something similarly positive (although `annotate` is the built-in neutral option, which is also pretty good).

[tibbon]

You're 100% right across the board. The tension between 'real job skills' and 'things that are good for the sake of learning' are very difficult to balance in a program where an overwhelming majority of students are looking for jobs immediately after the program. This was something I thought about every single day.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, it makes me feel like a curmudgeon, or like a job-protectionist, but I think it's a shame that so much of the "learn to code" movement is focused on training for professional software jobs, rather than on learning how programming works so that it can be used as a base tool, more akin to writing or arithmetic. Teaching all these professional techniques up front seems to me like training people for statistics or accounting jobs before they've taken middle school math.

[tibbon]

That focus comes largely from the students. They want/need a job asap. Unlike a college freshman who has 4+ years to learn, and has set aside that space in their lives, it isn't uncommon for a student leaving these programs to be down to their last 30-60 days of savings after this program and need a job immediately.

Anything you teach them that is simply theoretical, you have to fight them to get them interested in. This isn't to say I didn't do it. I taught students basic C, binary conversion, arduino, basic electronics, game programming, noSQL databases, computer science, etc... in various classes. But there was always a group of students who wanted nothing outside of what they would need on the job, immediately.