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Comment by dgerges | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if that's not directly related to the post. I don't really get the story behind Rasberry PI. Is the goal to make something cheap enough so that it spreads widely ? Otherwise there are plenty of platforms that would be better for learning programming starting with a simple browser no ?

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I don't fully understand the excitement either. But I don't think learning to program is really one its strong points. Learning to work with input/output systems might be on the list but there are other platforms for that as well. I think the pi has a combination of low cost, relatively high processing power, and significant input/output capabilities that really attracts hardware hackers.

For learning to program I think I'd just go with a javascript scratchpad in a browser. Or for core concepts and less kludge, maybe just a node repl. I guess you could use a pi for that if you don't have a machine that you want to play with but that isn't why people are jazzed about the pi.

I share the view that Javascript can be a very universal learning environment (even if in itself that may not be the greatest langage to learn)

It's supposed to be a new "BBC Computer". The excitement is trivial if you had ever used one (or it's peers of the era, ZX Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC or Oric Atmos -- though the BBC was head and shoulders above the rest when it came to learning to program and tinker). If you haven't - it might take a while to explain (and I'm not going to try in the HN comment box - read about the BBC Master, watch the show "Micro Men", and read about the history of Acorn and ARM if you are interested).

I think it can be summed us thusly: RPi is a project by people who grow up during the golden time of British personal computing - who are trying to reestablish the magic.

You can't program on bare metal or arbitrary hardware I/O with just a browser. And running the OS off a SD card makes recovering from screw-ups easier + less costly, so less barriers to tinkering vs. a "real" PC.

You're right, there's some programming you can't do inside of a browser, I was just forgetting all this low level stuff which happens behind the browser :-)

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