Many of my nerdy friends are trying to learn the basics of programming, as a vocational skill. They're not interested in computational science, which is often what's taught.

In college classes, these friends often encounter the situation where a class is taught by 1 professor each term, and the intro classes tend to receive the less-desirable professors. These are the professors whose assignments don't line up with class lessons, who teach programming history before techniques, etc. This puts them into the situation of having to suffer though learning a difficult subject with little help, or waiting years until one of the "better" professors teaches an intro class.

With Codecademy, it's easy to get discouraged because of the lack of people around -- you can go onto the forums, but there are no humans in proximity to commiserate or discuss hard problems. Further, some of the problems are broken -- while you and I can just "look in the back of the book" aka read the forum, others see this as "cheating" in the same way that reading a GameFAQ is "cheating" at a game.

What seems to be needed is something similar to Codecademy, but with lab/office hours -- where people can work at their own pace but in the same space as others at their same level, and people with more advanced skills, who can give advice and mentor. I've envisioned this as a hackerspace for some time, where the mentors are also working on projects, and may even receive advice from other members. Like a mix of montessori schools and valve.