@Ashwin — nice, but probably not hipster enough. Is there a really obscure equivalent to Donald Trump that not many people have heard about?

@Nicholas — that sounds like the right way to go — perhaps we could do it the way YouTube allow you to customise the embed link. Great point about Python 3!

@Duncan — we’ve heard of problems like that when people have Adblock Plus running, so if you see this reply I’d be very grateful if you could let me know if you have it installed, and if so if the problem goes away if you switch it off.

WRT bug/feature. I think I’d make it a part of the user’s settings. Perhaps even on a per-site basis. For example, I might want to isolate my console on ntoll.org but make all others shared. Default is to share the console between sites. It’d be helpful to specify which *sort* of Python I want to use per site too. In fact, it’d be handy if a site could pass a flag to say what sort of Python it needs (good for learning situations where people might be following a tutorial based on, say, Python 3.* rather than 2.7).

Keep up the great work!

N.

@jasiek — that’s a great idea, perhaps a slightly later part of the tutorial but it could definitely help. $LARGE_PERCENTAGE of programming is debugging, after all. That’s why I like telling people to type in the code rather than the trypython.com trick of having a button to copy/paste — it’s amazing how much one learns from typos when starting a new language.

@njr — you obviously started at a higher level than I did ;-)

@Daniel — I had a very similar experience, mostly through mags called things like “Amstrad CPC Computing” rather than Byte. But yes, once you’re at the stage where you can start hacking on real live code, then just doing that rather than reading books is the way to go. IMO once you’ve spent some time doing the practice then it’s time to go back to theory again, but there’s little point in learning about clever recursive techniques before you’ve written something useful for yourself and got the coding habit.

@Steve — I should have guessed there’d already be a name for it, and that O’Reilly would be keen on in (and that you’d be involved)… Totally agreed re: typing — not only is the typo-driven learning I mentioned in my answer to jasiek, there’s also the way it just beds in better when you actually code it yourself. I guess Pimsleur’s insistence that you repeat the word fragments, words and sentences in the language you’re learning hooks into the same thing. Thanks for passing on the word about PAW, we’ve got great hopes for it as a learning tool.