Rant: the free intro class at my library in Tucson showed me most beginners quit because of setup, not syntax
I sat in on the free intro class at the Tucson library last Saturday and counted 14 people in the room. The teacher spent 40 minutes just getting Python and VS Code working on laptops, and by the end only 6 of them had run a single line of code. I think this is the real reason people quit early. Nobody expects to spend their first hour fighting installers and PATH errors when they came to learn. Everyone wants to jump into loops and functions but the setup wall kills the joy right away. The teacher told me she sees the same drop-off each session and it's never about the logic part. Why do we act like the first lesson in coding should be about code when the actual first lesson is fighting your own machine?