4 ms·

All true. I considered mentioning Excel, GUI builders, HTML, and flash (I'm too young to remember hypercard) but couldn't fit it into the post without rambling.

by saulrh 14y ago

All true. I considered mentioning Excel, GUI builders, HTML, and flash (I'm too young to remember hypercard) but couldn't fit it into the post without rambling. That said, nearly everybody ends up at the command line eventually. Javascript error console, learning a second language, building a daemon or a library, what have you. Having started on GUI builders myself and stalled until I moved to the command line, I think that other paradigms are good for catching new programmers' attention, but the command line is where you really learn what's going on, and you have a slightly better time if you start out there. (child or parent) The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis.

adrianhoward 14y ago
The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis. Hmm... I guess that makes sense. I'm probably thinking about it from the UK perspective where I don't think it'll have that same impact. At $35 per-student still seems like an awful lot of cash per-student to me if the rants teacher friends give me about getting current text books, etc. are anything to go by. Let me put it another way. I think there are a bunch of folk who remember getting into development because of small, cheap computers with a simple command line interface. They look around today and don't see those machines, and think that adding them back will produce an influx of new developers. But the world is different now. Back then computers were "new". Back then people were buying those boxes as "the home computer". For games and word processing and finance as well as "programming" (in 99% of cases they were never used for writing or financials - but they were sold that way :-) I'm going to be surprised if the raspi has anything like the impact that the early Sinclair computers had in the UK for example. I still hope I'll be surprised though :-)

by saulrh 14y ago

adrianhoward 14y ago

The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis. Hmm... I guess that makes sense. I'm probably thinking about it from the UK perspective where I don't think it'll have that same impact. At $35 per-student still seems like an awful lot of cash per-student to me if the rants teacher friends give me about getting current text books, etc. are anything to go by. Let me put it another way. I think there are a bunch of folk who remember getting into development because of small, cheap computers with a simple command line interface. They look around today and don't see those machines, and think that adding them back will produce an influx of new developers. But the world is different now. Back then computers were "new". Back then people were buying those boxes as "the home computer". For games and word processing and finance as well as "programming" (in 99% of cases they were never used for writing or financials - but they were sold that way :-) I'm going to be surprised if the raspi has anything like the impact that the early Sinclair computers had in the UK for example. I still hope I'll be surprised though :-)