I do admire the raspberry pi project for their work, but for just programming simple python projects, any 15 year old core 2 duo will work and people can't get rid of them fast enough
RasPi have that consistency factor and the "game boy" factor of kinda being able to throw one against a wall and for it to work.
It's not the best programming experience but at least it'll be consistent. (Part of this is a Python problem tho tbh. Every Django Girls thing is half "go through the code" and half "try to figure out what weird situation your computer is in", even for Macs)
But most won’t keep programming, so I think it’s smart to at least keep this class focused on its purpose, which isn’t to see who can get most frustrated by their decade old Dell tower.
Or just wipe it and throw ubuntu on it
Not to mention that all this futzing around is usually indicative of leaky abstractions up the wazoo.
There are hard things in programming, sometimes. It's hard to write iterative quick sort without introducing off-by-one bugs. But most shit is easy, and a lot of hardness is around just busted tooling.
In many ways Apple is making this kind of thing harder and not easier.
Yeah it is kind of annoying that the language that's going to be best for instructing kids/beginners has such a terrible ecosystem that will put kids in such frustrating PITA positions getting the environment right.
Most notably, the Linux kernel runs on every Android smartphone/tablet SoC, but only a tiny fraction of them have public documentation.
And btw, community is a bit factor with Linux. Anything you can't figure out is only typically a search away.
Has Broadcom released any more than a tiny subset of the documentation they have on the SoC?