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by bluetshirt
4673 days ago
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Web development in the 90s and early 00s was not a practical substitute for learning how to program. Now, it is. You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a kid? |
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Of course it was... many people did learn that way. If anything, it was more accessible then than now. Actually, 'substitute' nothing, something that is is not a substitute. That's not the point though, you could teach middle-schoolers to program with fucking Java if you wanted to, though of course you shouldn't.
Say you're a teenager and what to program "Snake". Are you going to get up off the ground with TI-BASIC or WebGL/whatever faster, and which is going to leave you more satisfied. On a calculator you have pushed something to its limits (in some limited way), with web-dev you have done nothing of the sort. Power and raw capability is not what you want from a teaching aid.
And to be clear, I am not arguing for a low-level next to the metal introduction to programming. (TI-BASIC is of course nothing of the sort.) I am arguing for giving children a pair of boots that fit, not a pair of boots suitable for industrial use. Something that they can properly fill out and master. Something with bounds that they can strive for and reach. Something that forces them to get clever when they reach those bounds.
If you think this is a bizarre concept, then look at Logo.