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by photojosh 2566 days ago
Good grief. What's wrong with going to www.python.org/downloads/ and clicking the big button at the top that says "Download the latest version for Mac OS X"?

If you can't even download an installer and run it, then yeah, maybe not quite ready for programming either.

Please forgive my snark, but this would be exactly my thought process as a reasonably competent computer user who wanted to learn Python.
1 comments
jasonkester 2565 days ago
He’s right though.

When I was six years old, learning to program involved turning on the computer and typing

  10 print “hello”
  run
That’s what I want for my kids. And there’s nothing even remotely like it in today’s world.
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em500 2565 days ago
Open Terminal

    $ echo "hello"
seems pretty much the same to me.

Even on Windows you can open the browser console and do

    > console.log("hello")
Just for teaching basic prints, variables, loops and functions, terminal bash on macOS/Linux or Javascript console work just as well as Commodore 64 BASIC.

The problem is not that the environment is not available or setup is too difficult. The problem is that there's now way more competition from other shinies readily available (web, apps, games, videos). Even if you boot your home PC straight into a terminal, as soon as the kids find the way to a web browser it's game over. Even on 1980s home micros, if the kids got access to (pirated) games, practically none would volunterily keep on programming BASIC.

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zelos 2565 days ago
Teaching bash scripting as an introduction to programming? Surely there are laws against that kind of cruelty?
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em500 2565 days ago
It's certainly not any worse than BASIC on 1980s home micro's. (IMO it's not any worse than Python either.)
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Fnoord 2565 days ago
When you were 6 years old is a different time from now. You probably did not have an always-on connection. There was probably no such thing as Web 2.0. Computers were more difficult to use. Google did not exist. The Internet was perhaps still taking off...
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skocznymroczny 2565 days ago
And then I remember that there wasn't much more to offer, because most "fun" functionality involved POKE'ing 'random' memory addresses.
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