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Comment by skeptical | Hacker News Reader

I for one, agree with arctangent. Unfortunately it seems to be a common trend here at hacker news, assuming that everybody could take a theoretical physics PhD while washing clothes by hand on some swamp in africa or india. I don't know why. Do many believe that they can look intelligent simply by stating that complex things are accessible to anybody? I'm getting tired of everybody talking about how their four year old kids implemented Lisp. Or how simple is to do things like computer programming. There are way more important things in life that I want my kids to prioritize at young age than computer programming. But then again, I'm a country boy, so I guess you can call me old fashioned.

On a personal annoyance note: when did 'coding' became cool again? I thought 'programming' was an accurate accepted word. 'Coding' is so 1997.

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I don't know about programming games, or complex applications.

But look how many people work with Excel or similiar - all the kids in Poland learn to use spreadsheets - and this is just purely funcitonal programming language with strange ui.

If they can understand "COUNT.IF" function and referencing cells in expressions - why couldn't they learn to write simple python srcipts.

Programming is easy to learn, hard to master. Most people don't need to learn to write elegant, correctly designed programs that are easy to extend. Most people would benefit from just knowing how to glue together simple scripts to automate what they are doing.

We don't require everybody to learn to write books, but we do want everybody to learn how to write note.

>and this is just purely funcitonal programming language with strange ui.

That's the key here. Variables/abstractions are grasped at the "formal operational" stage of cognitive development. A functional language with concrete elements( e.g table cells ) side steps this requirement. Reduce USEFUL APIs to concrete constructs and it'll be accessible to a lower common denominator.

You guys are slowly walking away from the main stream concept of programming. Not that you're not right, but what's the point of the article then?

So, using boolean syntax on google, is that programming too? I wouldn't say it isn't, but if we're talking about that than that already happened and the use of the word 'coding' becomes hilarious.

I'm not sure I agree with the article. I feel neutral.

I'm talking about some sort of middle ground. A concrete subset of a more capable ontology.

Imagine if we had a Smalltalk OS/platform and something like Scratch was a seamlessly integrated interface for example.

http://scratch.mit.edu/

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