Free tool offers 'easy' coding

news.bbc.co.uk

2 points·rami··3 comments

That is a lot like the programming gui for the Lego Mindstorms system. It seems like a good way to get kids interested in programming if only to bridge them to working with actual code.

Does it run the risk of hiding too much of what actual coding entails?

Put another way: Many developers look down on Visual Basic because it made certain things easy and other (arguably more important) things near impossible, creating (so the argument goes) a group of coders who didn't, and never would, understand programming in any meaningful sense.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise VB as a good way to get people interested in "real" coding.

Does ease of use, and quick results in a limited domain, really act as a gateway to sophisticated programming?

I suspect the trick is to make it hackable in an interesting way, so that those with some motivation have a natural path to go learn how computational systems work when the default interface become too limiting. (VB was always usable enough that few people felt the need to go learn C or C++ whatever to accomplish things, so it was easy for people to be satisfied.)

VB was my first programming language (I was 15 at the time) it is a good way to produce results fast and learn about conditional statements, loops and functions. Later, I switched to C and C++.

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