From what I understand, Porcupine01 believes cubing in public is better for practicing (which I assume that the purpose is to get better competition results?
@Porcupine01 correct me if I'm wrong), while
@MJS Cubing believes staying at home is better for learning. I agree with both.
Being exposed to a crowd will slowly help with getting nervous, but it isn't ideal if you simply want to learn new algs/concepts.
Learning,
however, will also require practice, for you need to get it in your muscle memory and all that. If you are in public, some people simply want to solve it as fast as possible, and thus would rather 2-look an OLL they're learning (just an example) instead of pausing, and trying to remember the alg with the chance that they might screw it up and embarrass themselves in front of a bunch of people. At home, I don't really see this problem.