[ryanlchan]

This reminds me: I'd love to see how many of CodeYear's sign-ups completed a term.

I have lots of friends who want to "learn to code" but get frustrated and quit. It's too easy to give up if you don't have "something bigger" continually pushing you forward.

[djblue2009]

I think those sorts of things (I include Codeacademy in there as well) are good to just expose people to programming and a way of thinking. I'm not so sure those "learn to program" programs will produce many professional software engineers, but I think they're great introductions.