[tungstenfurnace]

I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second.

Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.

If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.

Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.

[bitwize]

Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS.

Counterpoint: Linux and Python.

Which makes the strong intersection between Mac-weenie-ism and Ruby-weenie-ism all the more idiosyncratic. Python is a much more Apple-y language: it works right out of the box; and the way you'd expect to do something is usually the way it is in fact done in Python.