Getting With the Program: Code Year

The new year brings a commitment to self-improvement: join a gym, read the Bible, learn Chinese or Arabic—or JavaScript. As of this writing, almost two hundred thousand people have signed up for Code Year, which offers a new “interactive programming lesson” once a week. It holds out a huge promise (“you’ll be building apps and web sites before you know it”) and asks nothing of you beyond your e-mail address. Also, it doesn’t explain what you’ll be doing beyond what I’ve laid out above, so the only way to find out more is to surrender your e-mail address. A link to the first lesson will arrive in our inboxes on Monday.

After a couple of code summers in junior high school, I decided that I prefer improving an inelegant paragraph to perfecting a buggy block of code—but I signed up for Code Year anyway. Some of it is professional curiosity; maybe this would be a good way for editors to understand the people we must work with ever more closely as reading moves from paper to screens. I share the philosophical belief that a proper education in today’s world includes learning to program, and maybe this could be a good tool for my children as they grow up. It also has a recreational appeal; programming has become one of those manly arts that fit the rubric of Being Handy, like fixing a bicycle or building a deck. (Code Year isn’t aimed just at men; it trumpets support from Girl Develop It.) The Code Year campaign also taps into deeper feelings of inadequacy, much like those Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books, only it’s about building up your mental muscles. If you can code, the implicit promise is that you will not be wiped out by the enormous waves of digital change sweeping through our economy and society.

Code Year is driving people to a site called Codecademy, and you can take a few courses there already. It is hardly the first online tutorial for would-be JavaScript programmers, but it has a nifty in-browser console and compiler that checks your work, and it guides you through a curriculum of mini-lessons that are not intimidating. It offers plenty of positive reinforcement, and incorporates many of the tools (or au-courant gimmicks) that keep casual gamers hooked: points for each correct answer, badges for various milestones, frictionless broadcasting of your incremental successes on Facebook or Twitter. In the three beginner courses now posted on Codecademy, some of the lessons could be written with more clarity, and while there are short-term goals (points) and ultimate goals (mastery of your own destiny), you can’t, or don’t, build anything that interesting yet. I’m curious to see, as the assignments get more complex, how good the interactive software is at helping you find your bugs and learn from your mistakes. Coding, like writing, requires a degree of focus and a high tolerance for frustration.

So, two hundred thousand of us do not want to get silicon kicked in our faces, but how many of us will make the commitment to see Code Year through? The sign-up page does not advertise how much time is required, but Slate’s Farhad Manjoo reports Codecademy’s estimate that “it will take a person of average technical skill about five hours to complete a lesson, so you’re looking at about an hour of training every weekday.” That’s four times what Charles Atlas asks for to make YOU a New Man. Some of those ninety-eight-pound weaklings who sent away for Atlas’s free brochure must have become bodybuilders—but I suspect more of them became programmers.

Image: Atomicsteve, Wikimedia Commons.