Now, of course, you know that these tools exist, and I know too. But most people don't and to them programming simply doesn't exist. Teaching these people quicksort in school won't be of much help.
> School courses will do nothing if people don't have
> access to programmable computers
When I finally had access to a computer and a real programming language (not some pseudo code) I just needed the syntax to write my programs in.
The tricky part is not to teach kids the syntax of language X, it's to teach them to operate abstract structures, and that is much much harder.
- To be really productive Javascript requires knowledge of HTML/CSS
- Both have their quircks
- For the things people do in their day jobs Excel/VBA is a better match
- You can do some mathematical stuff easier, it has matrix multiplication and a generally usable solver
It doesn't help you with everyday stuff. It doesn't exist in Windows GUI, unlike (most) other Windows software. You don't use it to build GUI apps, games, web services or whatever may be considered "interesting" nowadays.
Contrast this with DOS which shipped with BASIC interpreter and demo games.
Well, that's almost solved with the Raspberry Pi: a fully programmable computer for just $40. It used to be a lot more expensive to give a child access to a computer that (s)he could program and tinker with...
A.) download this software package (say, Python) that allows kids to learn how to program. B.) buy a dozen $40 mini-computers kids can use to learn how to program.
Most schools I know of would pick option A.
Day 1: Learn how to setup the language on your computer.
A lot of books, like Learn Python the Hard Way, make this the first step.
You are given a black box which does some stuff, but you have no idea how it does this stuff or how to make it do something else. You don't even know that it would be relatively easy with a decent IDE.