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by DrHankPym 5287 days ago 

    > Mobile web browsers don't include any development or
      debugging tools.
LOL. Great point. /sarcasm

    > The cost of installing Visual Studio or Eclipse is
      pretty small considering that you only have to do it
      once.
Boom. That's all it takes to create a barrier of entry. Not everyone has permissions to install whatever they want on the computer they're using.

Then you get into issues with multiple operating systems. Windows does it one way and Linux and OSX does it another way. Also, the tools you've mentioned are always changing. Will it be the same in a year or two?

And for what? So you don't confuse an extra set of comparison operators? Javascript is not that bad.
1 comments
kenjackson 5287 days ago
Boom. That's all it takes to create a barrier of entry. Not everyone has permissions to install whatever they want on the computer they're using.

Then you get into issues with multiple operating systems. Windows does it one way and Linux and OSX does it another way. Also, the tools you've mentioned are always changing. Will it be the same in a year or two?

But won't they need to install an editor anyways? Or are they just going to use notepad? That will be a horrible experience.

And JS is changing too. None of the languages change so drastically that it's not just something simple to incrementally learn. And I think getting students used to the fact that things change isn't a bad thing. But also let them know that typically backwards compat isn't broken with these changes.

With that said I'm a big fan of JS as a first language. I'd probably spend the first day with them using notepad or vi (or whatever is natively installed on the system) -- and then have them install some nice IDE of my choosing.

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wahnfrieden 5287 days ago
I'm all for vim, but you're mad if you think first-time coders should pick that up before even writing their first piece of code. Talk about barriers to entry and unintuitive behaviors...

I think the most viable environments for absolute beginners will be online ones that include an REPL and editor, using either JS or something that compiles to JS or to anything else on the backend, so even browser choice is irrelevant. Then you don't have to teach how to load a JS file into a document and so on.

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thenduks 5287 days ago
Khan Academy is a training/teaching company. I don't think it's a leap to assume they will be providing online tools to write code with (eg http://c9.io/).
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