I completely agree. Unfortunately, a lot of educational languages take an overly structured approach to programming and therefore end up delivering exactly the wrong impression.
One thing I miss about the computers of my childhood was the BASIC interpreter bundled with pretty much every classroom and personal computer; it’s an appalling language, but it does provide a simple and friendly environment for bare-bones programming, and that’s invaluable from a learning perspective. As late as my high school years, similar development environments existed on things like graphing calculators (I once stumbled into teaching my stoner lab partners the basics of programming, as a side effect of competing to discover creative ways of displaying crude messages), but it’s a feature that seems to have fallen by the wayside now.
I suppose we’ve got things like Lua scripting, and of course there’s a copy of gcc squirreled away on every Mac that ships, but I really don’t know how well it compares.
I believe there’s a copy of Python squirreled away on every Mac and most Linux computers, so I’ll call this progress, if we ignore Windows.
I read all my highschool math textbooks within the first couple months of the school year, so I usually spent the rest of the class period writing reversi or minesweeper or snake on my TI-85.
I learned to love both math and programming by attempting to write a Scorched Earth game on my TI-83. I had a really tough time figuring out how to do ballistic calculations, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I figured it out.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, a lot of educational languages take an overly structured approach to programming and therefore end up delivering exactly the wrong impression.
One thing I miss about the computers of my childhood was the BASIC interpreter bundled with pretty much every classroom and personal computer; it’s an appalling language, but it does provide a simple and friendly environment for bare-bones programming, and that’s invaluable from a learning perspective. As late as my high school years, similar development environments existed on things like graphing calculators (I once stumbled into teaching my stoner lab partners the basics of programming, as a side effect of competing to discover creative ways of displaying crude messages), but it’s a feature that seems to have fallen by the wayside now.
I suppose we’ve got things like Lua scripting, and of course there’s a copy of gcc squirreled away on every Mac that ships, but I really don’t know how well it compares.
I believe there’s a copy of Python squirreled away on every Mac and most Linux computers, so I’ll call this progress, if we ignore Windows.
I read all my highschool math textbooks within the first couple months of the school year, so I usually spent the rest of the class period writing reversi or minesweeper or snake on my TI-85.
I learned to love both math and programming by attempting to write a Scorched Earth game on my TI-83. I had a really tough time figuring out how to do ballistic calculations, but I thought it was the coolest thing ever when I figured it out.