This is a problem of concern not only to engineers and those in the "hard sciences," and a problem rooted not only in how people may learn how to program, but also to the everyday user who still views the computer as a magical box from which porn and solitaire emanate. Yes, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians (to name a few) should know how to program. There is nothing inherently evil about using straight C to generate a Taylor expansion for some series of interest; in fact there is a lot--aside from the development of intuition per unit investment of time which is indispensable for the student and of, perhaps, decreasing usefulness to the professional--that the specialist has to gain from applications such as this.
But programming shouldn't be useful only for geeks. Using a computer shouldn't be an experience restricted to those who can count past 18. I submit to you that there are very useful, although very complicated, devices that we use on a daily basis the general workings of which we may consider to be common sense. Blenders, washing machines, automobiles, and television sets to name a few. My grandmother knows that the little propeller on the bottom of the blender cuts food up, although she may not know exactly how that blade gets spinning that fast or anything so hi-tech. But still, there is a level of knowledge there that she possess from observing the apparatus at work. GE cannot knock on her door sometime in August and demand twelve dollars for all of the work it takes them to chop up graham crackers or whatever else the batty old ninny chops on that ridiculous thing. Although GE may come to her door and demand twenty dollars for getting the little blade to spin quickly, she possesses a degree of freedom.
There seems to be--and this is of course simply my own observation--a general progression towards greater absolute understanding (knowing more separate things about the workings although the entire general workings may be, relatively, as vague) of a device as its complexity, capacity for danger, and usefulness increase. You probably know more about your car than about your toaster. It may be general stuff--I put gas in my car. When I turn on my car the gas somehow makes the wheels spin. My car goes when that happens. Turning the wheel makes the car move. Hitting this button makes it slow down; this other one speeds it up. When I put toast in my toaster and push down the button, it toasts the toasts. Then the toast comes back up. There are fewer operating parameters. Of course, this is contestable. But what isn't contestable is this: Black and Decker has never come to my house to tell me how to not break my toaster. Microsoft tells me repeatedly not to break my computer.
How can I accept--increasingly--the dependency on the Big Boys of Software Design to figure out how to make stuff easy for me and my grandma? When is she autonomous enough to break the damn thing if she wants? Yes, I understand that the point is to make things easy for her. That's a very noble goal--but what sort of users are being created from this process? What sort of world will we live in thirty years down the road when my exquisite knowledge of 80X86 assembly language (I can change a JMP to a JXX and vice versa. This is NOT impressive.) will be rendered on widescreen HDTV and paraded about with captions in big friendly letters? Who will Microsoft hire then?
A couple of previous posters mentioned the Apple ][e and the Apple BASIC it had. Personally, I think that this is an idea that was not only necessary then, but also necessary (although for slightly different reasons) now. Unfortunately; the relative amount of damage a newbie could do with BASIC for the given set of system specs at the time was monstrous compared to the relative amount of damage a newbie could do (in just about any programming environment) in Windows today. If you get some of that hot gaming action on your computer and try to, from zero (or even nonzero--in fact, let zero go to infinity) programming
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This is a problem of concern not only to engineers and those in the "hard sciences," and a problem rooted not only in how people may learn how to program, but also to the everyday user who still views the computer as a magical box from which porn and solitaire emanate. Yes, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians (to name a few) should know how to program. There is nothing inherently evil about using straight C to generate a Taylor expansion for some series of interest; in fact there is a lot--aside from the development of intuition per unit investment of time which is indispensable for the student and of, perhaps, decreasing usefulness to the professional--that the specialist has to gain from applications such as this.
But programming shouldn't be useful only for geeks. Using a computer shouldn't be an experience restricted to those who can count past 18. I submit to you that there are very useful, although very complicated, devices that we use on a daily basis the general workings of which we may consider to be common sense. Blenders, washing machines, automobiles, and television sets to name a few. My grandmother knows that the little propeller on the bottom of the blender cuts food up, although she may not know exactly how that blade gets spinning that fast or anything so hi-tech. But still, there is a level of knowledge there that she possess from observing the apparatus at work. GE cannot knock on her door sometime in August and demand twelve dollars for all of the work it takes them to chop up graham crackers or whatever else the batty old ninny chops on that ridiculous thing. Although GE may come to her door and demand twenty dollars for getting the little blade to spin quickly, she possesses a degree of freedom.
There seems to be--and this is of course simply my own observation--a general progression towards greater absolute understanding (knowing more separate things about the workings although the entire general workings may be, relatively, as vague) of a device as its complexity, capacity for danger, and usefulness increase. You probably know more about your car than about your toaster. It may be general stuff--I put gas in my car. When I turn on my car the gas somehow makes the wheels spin. My car goes when that happens. Turning the wheel makes the car move. Hitting this button makes it slow down; this other one speeds it up. When I put toast in my toaster and push down the button, it toasts the toasts. Then the toast comes back up. There are fewer operating parameters.
Of course, this is contestable. But what isn't contestable is this: Black and Decker has never come to my house to tell me how to not break my toaster. Microsoft tells me repeatedly not to break my computer.
How can I accept--increasingly--the dependency on the Big Boys of Software Design to figure out how to make stuff easy for me and my grandma? When is she autonomous enough to break the damn thing if she wants? Yes, I understand that the point is to make things easy for her. That's a very noble goal--but what sort of users are being created from this process? What sort of world will we live in thirty years down the road when my exquisite knowledge of 80X86 assembly language (I can change a JMP to a JXX and vice versa. This is NOT impressive.) will be rendered on widescreen HDTV and paraded about with captions in big friendly letters? Who will Microsoft hire then?
A couple of previous posters mentioned the Apple ][e and the Apple BASIC it had. Personally, I think that this is an idea that was not only necessary then, but also necessary (although for slightly different reasons) now. Unfortunately; the relative amount of damage a newbie could do with BASIC for the given set of system specs at the time was monstrous compared to the relative amount of damage a newbie could do (in just about any programming environment) in Windows today. If you get some of that hot gaming action on your computer and try to, from zero (or even nonzero--in fact, let zero go to infinity) programming