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Do Kids Still Program?
From his journal, hogghogg asks: "I keep finding myself in conversations with tertiary educators in the hard sciences (Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, etc.) who note that even the geeks—those who voluntarily choose to major in hard sciences—enter university never having programmed a computer. When I was in grade six, the Commodore PET came out, and I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to program it. Now, evidently, most high school computer classes are about Word (tm) and Excel (tm). Is this a bad thing? Should we care?" Do you think the desire to program computers has declined in the younger generations? If so, what reasons might you cite as the cause?
...a current highschool student. I must say, programming is a dying art among my peers because it's seen as 'uncool, unhip and boring.' There's no drive for it any more. I'm in my Junior (Grade 11.) year and I'm just picking up some C++ and C. Granted, I learned how to program for LinguaMOO's and I picked up some HTML back in 5th and 6th grade, so it's a little easier for me. But the point is, it's been... convoluted? I guess that'd be the word I'm looking for. It's been washed out by things like sports, staying fit and doing drugs. Hooray.
Seriously, the complexity associated with modern development tools is way too steep a curve for your average 14 year old to wrap their heads around. We're trying to address this to a certain extent with the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but it's a tough problem. It's no longer as simple as getting a bare-bones BASIC interpreter built into your computer's ROM. I think there have been some cool advances in this space, though, in the recent past. Take the Kids' Programming Language, for example. It's is expressly aimed at the younger crowd. I've seen a demo of it (the guys from Morrison Schwartz who created it came by to give a talk on it last year), and I must say that I am suitably impressed their work. Check it out if you have a younger child who you want to introduce to development.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
Computers no longer ship with an easy to use basic that gives instant results.
Mine did. Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app; % python.