A few links on the teaching of programming

As I (slowly) emerge from my holiday stupor, another short post on a collection of related topics:

• CodeAcademy, an interesting new startup backed by Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures, is seeing impressive signups for their new online programming course: Code Year. For the time being, I'm not doing much web programming, so I didn't sign up, but if you did, let me know what you think.
• Meanwhile, Christian Heilmann is concerned about the quality of introductory programming language instruction, and writes a detailed critique of one such beginners's tutorial: Teach Them How To Hit The Ground Running And Faceplant At The Same Time?. Heilmann follows up his critique with another posting on his personal blog a few days later: Beginner tutorials who don’t help beginners?. In the two articles, Heilmann makes several points, but the ones which stuck with me were: (a) worry more about teaching people than about making them happy, and (b) don't take short-cuts at the start which will need to be un-learned soon afterwards:

  “Quick tutorials for beginners” are killing our craft. Instead of pointing to existing documentation and keeping it up to date (in the case of the wiki-based docs out there) every new developer turned to an author wanting the fame for themselves. And a lot of online magazines cater to these to achieve “new” content and thus visitors. We measure our success by the number of hits, the traffic, the comments and retweets. And to get all of that, we want to become known as someone who wrote that “very simple article that allowed me to do that complex thing in a matter of minutes”.

  As Heilmann points out, Smashing Magazine is generally not known for these sorts of things, and is usually a great source of quality educational material. It's pleasing to see that the Smashing Magazine editors are hosting this discussion on their site, clearly they agree that it's an important problem.
• Lastly, the amazing John Resig, author of the JQuery Javascript toolkit, writes about his work at Khan Academy on using Javascript as a language for teaching programmers: JavaScript as a First Language. Resig enumerates a number of reasons why he feels that Javascript is appropriate for use as a first programming language, and notes the importance of teaching good habits from the start, but also observes that full instruction will require more than just a single language:

  It should be noted that while we're starting with JavaScript as a first language - largely due to its ubiquity, desirability in the larger workforce, lack of prior installation requirements, and ability to create something that's easy to share with friends - we're not going to be myopic and only focus on JavaScript. There are so many things that can be learned from other languages, not to mention entire skillsets that aren't terribly relevant to in-browser JavaScript, that it behooves us to try and bring as much of them into our curriculum as possible.

I don't know what the future will bring, but I am extremely confident that it will bring a need for more programmers, and for more people who at least understand programming, even if they don't practice it full-time themselves.

So it's great to see the field continuing to discuss, take responsibility for, and invest in the teaching and training of new programmers.

Update: "employees have been known to sign up for courses on their own". Horrors!