Cody,

As someone who is non-technical and bursting with ideas, I can very much relate to the Scrollkit ethos. The Web is most definitely "behind glass" and I love that you are changing that. That being said, I think you are picking the wrong battle by trying to connect Scrollkit with the debate over whether or not the masses should learn how to code.

When people sign up for Codecademy they aren't doing it because they want to build personal webpages and gif-laden birthday cards. No, they are gung-ho about Code Year because they have aspirations of building a functional web application (which is likely their imagination of the next Facebook or Foursquare).

So it is great that Scrollkit empowers me to create beautiful landing pages for Branch, on my own, without bugging my engineering team. But if I had not met my amazing technical co-founders I would probably be deep into Railscasts right now.

You should really be picking a fight with Flavors.me, WordPress, and Weebly – no?

Yes, this really seems to be more inline with Brett Victors discussion on play and invention (youtube.com). It's not an issue of learn to code vs. play. I'd take it a step further and say that there are domains of thought suffocated by the technical and material constraints of their realization. I believe I can code pretty quickly and efficiently, but somewhere between setting up my 100th Nginx install, banging out a template, importing the same css/js boilerplate and getting my deploy chain set up, I lose the joie de whateverimworkingon. The focus inevitably shifts from the product to the process.

That's the exciting thing for me about Scrollkit. The comparison to Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG web editors are poor because the spirit is different. Scrollkit is not about being a tool to produce a website, another backend into the same slog. It's about spontaneous creation, having an idea and realizing it before you get mired in markup.

That's what excites me.

There's absolutely a relationship between the two, but it's also shortsighted to pit them against each other.

There are both intrinsic and instrumental reasons kids should be introduced to — in keeping with Cody's analogy — art. The intrinsic reasons are that it lets them explore their relationship to the rest of the world and learn to see the way things could be rather than the way they are. The instrumental reasons are that without learning to fingerpaint and play with macaroni, they won't have built a foundation that enables them to learn how to paint with oils and blend pastels, get the hang of color theory and perspective, or — for the very talented few — become the next, say, Leonardo or Rothko or Hirst.

Becoming those people is as much about learning to think artistically (Scrollkit) as it is about mastering artistic techniques (Codecademy). You can't have one without the other.

But does Rothko have a mastery of photorealistic acumen? Does Hirst have a Michelangelo-like ability to sculpt? Of course not. But both were able to fundamentally change their domains. Both had unique ideas that they were able to express by playing with different media. Because in art, expression can be divorced from implementation in a way that, currently, is less possible digitally.

I completely agree that people should learn to code (cf. gist.github.com). I just think it's a different discussion. We have a lot of tools for photorealistic painting (creating technological products through technological skill). We have far fewer blank canvases that let us experiment without that skill.

Even if they don't master those skills/conventions — hell, even if they actively rebel against them (A postmodernism/modernism movement in computer engineering... What a thought!) — isn't it important that they understand them?

I don't think I can top Erik's reply.

It would be wonderful if more people learned to program but this isn't a realistic option for most people as they don't have the time or confidence. I recently asked my former roommate, who works at Automattic, whether learning PHP or learning to fly a single seat airplane took longer. He said PHP. Telling people that they 'should' learn to program to express themselves on the web seems encouraging until they realize what kind of commitment is really required.

The most exciting response from people who use scroll kit is when they tell us that this is the first time 'they' built a website and they didn't previously think they could do that. We want people to get hooked on that feeling. Once there, they can develop their skill and eventually graduate to something more advanced - this can be codecademy but it can also be Photoshop. Getting people to take the first leap is the hardest part.

So it's a gateway drug, of sorts? I buy that — that the barrier to entry for creative acts online is far too high, or at least too structured.

In your post, you said "there has been a sweeping enthusiasm to teach people to make the web in the past few years and most of the effort has revolved around teaching them to code. I don't think this is going to work."

This feels incomplete to me, though. You don't think this is going to work without... what?

(Framed that way, Scrollkit becomes an extension of other things, rather than a competitor to them, which feels more accurate, no?)

I would edit "there has been a sweeping enthusiasm to teach people to make the web in the past few years and most of the effort has revolved around teaching them to code. I don't think *this is the only way we can help more ideas to come to life.* " But that's just me.

Or we might have said that "this isn't going to work *for most people.*"

I think what often happens is that programmers create tools for other people expecting those people to be just like them. They remember how thrilling and addictive it was when they first learned to code and want to spread that excitement to more people.

But the act of programming, itself, just isn't that cool to a lot of people. Cody taught himself to code before I did, because he had a project he wanted to build and no one was going to do it for him, but in the end he never got into it the way I did. Josh, it sounds like you're the same way, you'd learn to code if you absolutely needed to, but the project came first.

We want to let people make projects immediately because we think that will be more addictive to most of them than learning javascript. If that pushes them to learn to code, awesome. If it pushes them to team up with a coder to make a more complicated project, that's pretty cool too.