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Ready CEO: Coding Snobs Are Not Helping Our Children Prepare For The Future (qz.com)
jader3rd writes: Quartz has an article written by the CEO of Ready, David S. Bennahum, about how public education should be embracing computer science, and how existing programmers don't like these efforts because they feel that doing so will result in kids being exposed to programming in a manner different then how they were introduced to it. Bennahum writes: "Writing software today is eerily similar to what it was like in the late 1950s, when people sat at terminals and wrote COBOL programs. And like the late 1950s, the stereotype of the coder is largely unchanged: mostly white guys with deep math skills, and minimal extroversion. Back in the Sputnik-era, people thought of programmers as a priesthood in lab coats: the sole keepers of knowledge that ran these exotic, and mysterious room-sized machines. Today the priesthood is a little hipper -- lab coats have long given way to a countercultural vibe -- but it's still a priesthood, perhaps more druidic than Jesuitic, but a priesthood nonetheless, largely comprised of white men." "Instead of attempting to lure code-literate teachers away from Silicon Valley, we need to revolutionize the way coding is done. Rather than fit the person to the tool, let's fit the tool to the person. Pop computing can help us get there, offering a gloriously diverse array of tools to match our gloriously diverse species. It's only a matter of time before the process of making software itself is transformed, from one that requires a mastery of syntax -- the precise stringing of sentences needed to command a computer -- to the mastery of logic. Logic is the essence of software creation, and the second step after mastering syntax.'
FTA: ..a priesthood nonetheless, largely comprised of white men.
Some of us are Asian, you insensitive clod.
Apple tried his approach once, it was called HyperCard. It was neat but ultimately slow and ill-suited to doing anything remotely hardware related. Nice for quickie databases, silly games, contact lists, etc but ultimately useless for more advanced problems without a lot of effort, external libraries and actual coding. At that point you might as well had just written your code in Pascal or C, it'd be faster and less of a clusterfuck.
It was a cute introduction to slapping together GUI apps though and a good 2nd step from traditional BASIC.
Personally I think traditional boring line-numbered BASIC on an 8-bit is a good introduction to see if kids will want to go further with programming. A simple introduction to 6502 or Z80 ASM afterwards will let them write more advanced programs by embedding machine code routines in their BASIC programs and will give them more of an idea of how the computer actually works. If they get bored or don't feel like doing it anymore you'll know that computer science is not for them.