> I do think, though, that for novice programmers...the overhead must seem immense. Agreed. This is why I recommend sites like Codecademy, Khan academy, etc, t

> I do think, though, that for novice programmers...the overhead must seem immense. Agreed. This is why I recommend sites like Codecademy, Khan academy, etc, to just get started and see if coding is for you. Purists will argue that they're teaching you their way to code, but it at least gets your foot in the door in two important ways: getting over the hurdle of environment, and getting the syntax of the language. In my personal experience, teaching someone(very interested but with zero experience) to code without some sort of boilerplate already in place was very frustrating indeed. Only after several hours and lengthy explanations of what things are and why they are used later could the actual coding begin. After completing enough of one of those options to grasp the syntax and language constructs, you can slowly introduce things like terminals, version management, environments, scripts, etc. As they wrap their head around each piece such that it's not in their way, they can get back to the coding that they're trying to focus on.