Hacker News Reader

Comment by taroth | Hacker News Reader

Um, what? Here we have a product serving the needs of teachers, built for "webmasters". How many course-builders out there want to familiarize themselves with 3 coding languages (HTML, Python, and JavaScript), when a easily conceivable web UI could accomplish the same goals?

Google is either throwing AppEngine fluff or a pump fake.

View on HN

Having worked in academic IT for most of my career, it's also really hard for me to imagine many professors using this considering how many of them have called me about problems due to WYSIWYG editors and whatnot. I guess this is mainly for an IT/coding audience, not for teaching history or something like that.

Quite a lot of CS professors could handle this, and and even higher proportion of their grad student Research Assistants. Y'know: the people who work at Google later and the people that train them.

This isn't iMovie; it's a courseware building platform. They didn't claim it would be useful for everyone.

Yeah, but are most of us who are capable at code going to want to deal with Appengine? Definitely not my own first choice.

It seems to be a very early release just like the article says. Additionally it is Apache Licensed. So even if Google is unable to deliver a brilliant and easy-to-use tool, others can probably create a layer on it. It's a win either way.

There's no reason a nice GUI couldn't be thrown on to the front end of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com