So I was discussing a suggestion for how to improve the documentation of one of the exercises, and someone responded that Exercism is meant for people who already have experience with programming and focuses on teaching the quirks/aspects of a particular language, rather than programming as a whole. This got me confused, because ever since I got on Exercism it was my impression that it teaches programming to absolute beginners from the ground up. If that’s the case, I think Exercism should really consider re-doing their messaging because it very (IMO) comes off as it is meant for absolute beginners and not just people who already have some experience.
Hello. Yes, it’s not for absolute beginners. The welcome video goes through this, explaining that it will be very tough if you’re starting from scratch.
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I see, thanks for clarifying. I had skipped the video as I’m not much of a video watcher. Perhaps consider adding some copywriting clarifying this for people who might skip the video?
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Yeah - we’re currently building a seperate platform totally for beginners, so we’ll make things clearer at that point 
I think in a way that it is very nice that you got this impression, even though we know this is not the case.
What was your entry point to Exercism? Was it through a track like Python that has a concepts (“Learning”) path? Or was it through a track that only has a practice mode?
Was it because, in some small or large part, due to the mentors that picked up your requests?
I’m just doing JavaScript exercises to hone my skills. But to be clear I’m an experienced programmer haha.
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Do you know if there was anything specific that gave you that impression?
I don’t know if there’s anything specific, I guess to me Exercism just gives off this vibe that it’s meant for beginners, with it’s messaging, the way it presents itself. Maybe it was just an irrational assumption. Maybe it stems from my personal assumption that if a learning platform doesn’t explicitly state that it’s for people who already have experience, that means it’s for beginners by default (since I missed the video where it’s explained that it’s not for beginners)
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I think I’d probably think the same from the landing page tbh.
IMO, friendly branding tends to mean “beginner” whereas serious, “hacker” branding tends to me “experienced”.
One way Exercism tries to test if Exercism is for someone is via the “Helllo World” exercise. People without very basic of programming can actually fail that exercise and give up on Exercism on that exercise.
It may seem a trivial exercise to you, but “Hello World” in a lot of languages is a function returning a string, and the concepts in it can be very hard for someone with little knowledge about programming.
I once met someone learning python via some online course. They were a bit into it. But the course at that point told students to use a lot of print() statements. For that person, the concept of “returning something to you” was via print statements. When faced with the “Hello World” exercise on Exercism they thought:
- Functions were not covered yet by my course, they must be an advanced topic.
- I don’t think I need a function here. Can I just delete it and
print("Hello World")in the file? - Printing works on my machine, I’m seeing it print the result, why doesn’t Exercism take it? This must be an Exercism issue.
Other variations of this include people who don’t delete the function, but replace the return line with a print statement.
This particular person gave up on Exercism for a bit. “Hello World” was the “this is not for you” warning for them.
I guess what gave you that impression is that:
- You were able to understand everything with no issues
- The exercises were trivial for you, specially in a language you already know well
- You saw very basic syntax being explained
But all these 3 points only tell me you know programming well. And that Exercism is a good place for you to learn a new language, and to mentor a language you know well!
When learning a new language, we are all inexperienced in that language, and like simple explanations of things. It’s also true that Exercism can be great for people with little programming experience, just not so little as to not know basic programming concepts.
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