Teaching Children Programming and Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 10:40:29AM -0400, Scott Elcomb wrote:
> I came across this blog post this morning and seems fairly relevant in
> support of using Python to help teach programming.
> 
> http://coffeeghost.net/2008/07/01/a-thousand-layers-of-abstractions/
> 
> 
> "Recently I've been thinking a lot about how we can get more people
> involved with programming. I don't necessarily mean programming as
> professionals, but just to develop enough of an understanding on what
> software is and how it works. So I wrote a book aimed at teaching
> games programming in Python to the 9 to 12 year age range (get 'em
> while they're young). In my "Python is the new BASIC" post, (which was
> a plug for my free, Creative Commons-licensed book, "Invent Your Own
> Computer Games with Python") I received this comment:
> 
>     You know, I took a look at that game book and it struck me how so
> 1980s the thing was. It brought me down to memory lane.
> 
>     Now, looking at the alternative (Squeak), which is fully OOP all
> the way down to the very menus and icons, buttons, which has a much
> richer environment and is totally ready for multimedia, along with the
> derived (written in Squeak) Scratch language, I think it's very bad
> that we're returning to Basic.
> 
>     Kids deserve something better in 2008, and we can deliver it, just
> as long as we keep our prejudice at bay against Smalltalk (because it
> really is about prejudice and lack of information)."

Personally I think OOP is a horrible idea that will eventually go away.
The future is functional programming since it is much simpler to
automatically parallelize and allows you to worry about what you want to
do rather than how to do it (where the programmer is often wrong and the
compiler maker knows much better).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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