Maybe it's time to simply class all the different types of spam (email, telemarketing, SMS, junk mail, FAX) together? - i.e simply have "do not contact" lists rather than different ones for each technology, so when the varblethrumpulator(TM) is invented we don't have to battle for new laws to specifically stop spamming arriving over it...
IMHO, the hardest part of learning any programming is just getting the environment working to the extent that you can play with it - unless all you want is to print text to the console it's inordinately hard nowadays with the ton of windowing etc. code that GTK or whatever expect. It's pretty difficult to code much from scratch in linux if you've no idea how to begin...
For example, getting graphics working in the good old DOS days was very simple - one function to set graphics mode, then write to the screen. No other code required. Granted, nowadays you just call a library to do all the complicated bits, but the amount of code bloat is impressive, and rather frustrating for the novice...
I think the important thing for beginners is to give them environments in which they can play with powerful code without having to worry about the learning intricacies of GTK (or whatever) as well as the language they're trying to learn.
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Maybe it's time to simply class all the different types of spam (email, telemarketing, SMS, junk mail, FAX) together? - i.e simply have "do not contact" lists rather than different ones for each technology, so when the varblethrumpulator(TM) is invented we don't have to battle for new laws to specifically stop spamming arriving over it...
IMHO, the hardest part of learning any programming is just getting the environment working to the extent that you can play with it - unless all you want is to print text to the console it's inordinately hard nowadays with the ton of windowing etc. code that GTK or whatever expect. It's pretty difficult to code much from scratch in linux if you've no idea how to begin... For example, getting graphics working in the good old DOS days was very simple - one function to set graphics mode, then write to the screen. No other code required. Granted, nowadays you just call a library to do all the complicated bits, but the amount of code bloat is impressive, and rather frustrating for the novice... I think the important thing for beginners is to give them environments in which they can play with powerful code without having to worry about the learning intricacies of GTK (or whatever) as well as the language they're trying to learn.