Nick Thieberger has a nice comic[1] which I think captures my sentiment about this. I think techies like us severely underestimate how much of a turnoff it can

Nick Thieberger has a nice comic[1] which I think captures my sentiment about this. I think techies like us severely underestimate how much of a turnoff it can be to begin someone's computer programming experience by making them schlep through an arduous installation and configuration process. You can promise them "really, we'll just get this right once, and it'll all be over", but that doesn't change the fact that this is their first encounter with programming, and that it will therefore have an incredibly disproportionate impact on how they conceive of the task and experience of programming. On a first date, would you interrogate your date about their likes and dislikes, childhood trauma, and insecurities? It's probably not entirely wrong to claim that this would pay off in the long term, but there is a good chance that this would strike the wrong tone and prevent a second date. A coarse metaphor perhaps, but there are some parallels. Imagine hearing someone tell you "You, too, can be a digital magician, and bend computers to your will", and then spending 1 hour bashing your head your keyboard trying to figure out how this Anaconda thing works (I thought I was using Python? What's Anaconda? Is it like Python but different?). If I were in that position again, I think I'd begin to wonder whether this is what programming is always like, and probably wonder if I want to do this after all. Certainly, as we all know, programming does always involve a great deal of resilience in the face of unsexy unfamiliarity, but there are transcendental moments when you look at what you just brought into the terminal and marvel at how this ever came to be possible, and I think trying to give a taste of that to people in a first encounter with programming with a minimum of pain leading up to it is the best way to make them so excited about programming they'll be willing to continue learning, and yes, set up an IDE and Python installation. [1]: http://www.nthieberger.net/phantom.jpg http://www.nthieberger.net/phantom.jpg