I'm checking CS on Khan academy every few weeks with hope for something like this, the Python class was great, but this is really exciting, and having Vi Hart do the videos is cool (or someone with a very similar voice...) - correction: it's narrated by Jessica Liu, who is doing an amazing job too
I wonder why they didn't do the Computer Science class in Python, especially that now more schools are adopting Python. Isn't Python better for learning than Javascript? Did they choose Javascript for this one just because they already had a Python course and they wanted a Javascript one now?
It seems pretty clear that it's for practical reasons: you want that sort of rich in-browser experience, it's going to be easiest to provide using JS.
What I think is a more interesting discussion is why they're not using CoffeeScript or some other flavor of JS that glosses over a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the language and arguably offers a more beginner-friendly syntax.
I think that python is the better choice for an in-person class, but building an in-browser js interpreter is a lot simpler than an in-browser python interpreter.
Hmm. that makes sense. because browser have been handling js for a longer time and so there would be more support for a in-browser js interpreter. I have seen some python in-browser interpreters, which are good though.
