| A couple of points: 1. Making programming accessible probably means making software more accessible. I remember a study of what mental capacity was most correlated with being able to learn foreign language. It was empathy. So a large part is wanting to communicate. If you want to communicate, you will find a way, and I think we see the same thing in programming. So called "non-programmers" learn the most absurd programming languages and systems if they are motivated. Also see Minecraft. And amazing/horrifying Excel spreadsheets. One of the issues I see with "novice environments" is that they tend to be very separate from everything else on the machine. I would find that very demotivating. What I would love to see is "open source as if we meant it", meaning programs that do something we want to do, that we would use, written in such a way (probably also: in such a language) that tinkering/adapting is a reasonable proposition. Yes, that means I don't think that currently is the case: except for the core-dev team, is it a reasonable proposition for people who want to adapt GNUmeric to download the source code and start tinkering? For novices? 2. I am not convinced by the low-end vs. high-end distinction I think a lot of the same things that make programming awful for beginners also make it awful for advanced programmers. We have just gotten used to the pain and accept it, though I am not sure why. 3. I am not convinced by starting over from scratch There are reasons why we have what we have, and not all of them are bad. 4. I am not convinced by not starting over from scratch Of the reasons why we have what we have, a lot of them are bad. A lot needs to be reexamined and rethought. Resolving that contradiction (thesis, antithesis?) is difficult, it requires looking at what we have in a lot of detail, including the history of how we got here, where we need apply tweaks and where we can interact properly with the rich computing tapestry we have. Just extending what we have is probably not a solution, because one of the problems is too much cruft, but just starting over from scratch is likely to lead to cool but ultimately superficial projects. |