Just a little while ago a family member who has signed up for a Coursera statistics course was asking if I could help "Download an R program". It took me a minute to figure out she really did mean the programming language, she didn't tell me straight off it was a statistics course, and she's about the last person I would have expected to take a course that involved programming of any sort. But the class does say it's "quite literally for everyone", so good on her.
When I asked if they have instructions on how to do that in the course material, she told me there's a thing that says "click here to download" but she hadn't tried it yet. She literally hadn't even tried clicking the thing that said it did exactly what she was asking me to help her do. Not "I tried it and I got an error" or even "I tried it and it didn't work", or better yet, "I downloaded something and don't know what do with it" no, not even tried.
I'm now dying of curiosity to find out what happens the first time she has to actually write code vs. just typing stuff in she's been handed. I might have to send her this article, we'll see! I've never done any R programming, though it now seems inevitable that I will be doing some in the near future.
I'm not sure about your family member, but folks who don't use their computers often may be more hesitant to randomly click a "Download" in case they accidentally download a virus or do irreparable damage to the computer. It's annoying, but totally understandable.
When I asked if they have instructions on how to do that in the course material, she told me there's a thing that says "click here to download" but she hadn't tried it yet. She literally hadn't even tried clicking the thing that said it did exactly what she was asking me to help her do. Not "I tried it and I got an error" or even "I tried it and it didn't work", or better yet, "I downloaded something and don't know what do with it" no, not even tried.
I'm now dying of curiosity to find out what happens the first time she has to actually write code vs. just typing stuff in she's been handed. I might have to send her this article, we'll see! I've never done any R programming, though it now seems inevitable that I will be doing some in the near future.