Comment by psyklic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psyklic | Hacker News Reader

I've taught coding to hundreds of beginning students, with about 50/50 Windows/Mac (some Linux). From my experience, Windows is not worse for beginners, nor is the setup process more laborious.

For example with Python, the author can standardize by having all students run the Anaconda Python installer alongside Visual Studio Code. This left us with virtually zero install/setup issues. Alternatively, using wsl2 you could set up any language very similarly to Mac/Linux.

In any regard, setup is typically a one-time cost. Once configured, students typically have no additional problems running code. That said, reducing getting-started friction is always welcome, and the author came up with a nice solution for personal computers. (Running `powershell -executionpolicy bypass` may not work on corporate laptops.)

Setup may be a one time sunk cost of opaque misery for you, but it's a lifetime of never getting any closer to truth understanding or enlightenment, upon a difficult opaque system that doesn't respect you & won't show you whats happening & has an array of barely supported weird add-on tools to accomplish the most basic software installs & setups.

It'll be a one time cost for your setup. Then a one time cost for the next setup as the student tries to do something else. Then another cost for the next effort. And the student will never gain any skill understanding or comprehension for any of these barely related steps.

Wsl2 is indeed savings Microsoft's bacon, by being some place where there are clear rules & patterns & behaviors, & where there's some kind of coherent underlying substrate. WSL2 is saving MS's ass. By not being Microsoft and by especially not being Windows. By being something social, with layers of accepted communal tools & platform.

Setup/config is a necessary evil on any OS. It's part of the game that you must learn to be a productive coder.

If the setup portion is a huge issue, students can use a pre-configured web solution such as replit. There, you're guaranteed to become dependent on an opaque third party platform (all just to save some minor setup hassle).

> setup is typically a one-time cost.

I think that's what he's complaining about. It's been a one-time cost, for 30% of customers, each with a different issue.

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