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While the cultural observations are all true, the class he's using as an example just seems really poorly planned.

It's not hard at all to motivate why programming is different from all those alternatives. The instructors just picked really terrible examples.

You can keep a room of nonprogrammers at rapt attention for an hour with 30 lines of Processing. Do something cool.

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sorry i should've provided context: these classes are meant especially for working professionals -- mostly in academia: librarians, research staff, scientists -- to learn skills to make themselves more productive at work. 30 lines of Processing is cool, but won't make them more productive in grepping through gigabytes of ill-formed archival data files, organizing and visualizing them, and making reports for their bosses.

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