I generally agree--a few small objections, however:
1) Israel is not a religious-fundamentalist state (not that I'm defending Israel or any state for that matter, but it simply is not).
I also have objections of the normative kind, but those are not within the allotted scope of this discussion--nor, I might add, was the content of the post to which I'm replying. (Normative discussion about whether posts whose content is outside the allotted scope of a discussion should be permitted is also outside the allotted scope of this discussion.)
The one thing that concerns me about this is that most Very Bad Things we have to fear are the same reasons spreading our species could be a Very Bad Thing.
I'd recommend LISP or Scheme; also Logowriter is a good tool. HyperCard is a personal favorite, but very old.
The particularly special thing about LISP/Scheme is that it is a philosophical language: it was invented for expression of ideas, and so it makes for a fantastic introduction to ways of thinking about programming, because it's designed to work the way human languages do--i. e., you learn to "think in" LISP/Scheme.
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I generally agree--a few small objections, however:
1) Israel is not a religious-fundamentalist state (not that I'm defending Israel or any state for that matter, but it simply is not).
I also have objections of the normative kind, but those are not within the allotted scope of this discussion--nor, I might add, was the content of the post to which I'm replying. (Normative discussion about whether posts whose content is outside the allotted scope of a discussion should be permitted is also outside the allotted scope of this discussion.)
The one thing that concerns me about this is that most Very Bad Things we have to fear are the same reasons spreading our species could be a Very Bad Thing.
I'd recommend LISP or Scheme; also Logowriter is a good tool. HyperCard is a personal favorite, but very old. The particularly special thing about LISP/Scheme is that it is a philosophical language: it was invented for expression of ideas, and so it makes for a fantastic introduction to ways of thinking about programming, because it's designed to work the way human languages do--i. e., you learn to "think in" LISP/Scheme.