[lorddoig]

Without a reason to attract (relative) experts beyond philanthropy I think there's a risk that a ballooning amateur/expert ratio could soon cripple this, as happened to the way Matasano Crypto Challenges used to be run.

I hate to be critical as I like the idea, and obviously there's some utility in it for experts as it is but it's much, much less so than for amateurs, and there's no reason to think that this imbalance won't manifest itself sooner or later. I feel this stands a much better chance of solving (or contributing to solving) the education problem and getting good traction if it was positioned to solve a much more general problem - like snippet management - in a really, really good way, and tacked these features on the side.

[mattetti]

I see that as a good problem to have, if Exercism gets big enough that it's an issue Katrina will be able to adapt her product to respond to the request.

Remember that this is a side, open source project, run by one person ;)

[lorddoig]

Totally agree. A completely off-topic aside (sorry) - I creeped your profile and was wondering, did you create your blog template yourself? It's pretty much exactly what I've been looking for for ages but haven't been bothered to make from scratch.

[vec]

It's already happening. I've known about Exercism for a while and used it to teach myself Go. It was very effective and the feedback was immensely helpful, especially at first.

But when I went through the Ruby track (a language I'm already quite proficient at), I got almost no feedback, helpful or otherwise. Some of my entries would get one or two "thumbs up"s, but no comments, and most got no responses at all. Now that I've got a pretty good grasp on Go, my last couple of exercises there have started to follow the same trend.