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'It is great for learning to code ' When the machine was first pitched it was as a spiritual successor to the BBC Micro computer - to inspire and create a gene
by andy_herbert 14y ago
'It is great for learning to code '
When the machine was first pitched it was as a spiritual successor to the BBC Micro computer - to inspire and create a generation of bedroom programmers.
Compared to the home computers of the 80s, the Raspberry Pi isn't as simple to use, you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get to a point where you can start to code in Python and in my opinion is sufficiently difficult enough to deter the lay person; a little bit more complicated than turning on a machine and getting a BASIC interpreter you can start typing commands into.
In my experience most of the Raspberry Pi community has been more interested in porting emulators and media players, rather than nurturing basic skills in computing for kids. I believe the world still needs a machine to get kids more interested in computer science and away from the spreadsheets and word processors, but I don't think this is the machine to do it.
- ivarkotnik 14y agoThe current RasPi community is not the community it was really intended for. It's primary audience is kids and youngsters and allowing them to get a feeling for a computer. And kids today are way smarter than I was at their age. They catch on very quickly and their curiosity as well as thirst to learn allows them to quickly adapt the RasPi to their wishes.
- slurgfest 14y agoAnyone who thinks that it was easy for kids to program those old computers probably doesn't remember looking through thick manuals of memory addresses, which would lead me to question how much they really did.
- shanselman 14y agoLOL, totally. I remember entering in the escape codes for an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer because there was no such thing is a printer driver. Just copied it from the back of the manual. Took a weekend.
- ralph 14y agoI looked through the BASIC manual of the ZX81; it had no thick section of memory addresses?
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoIf the average layperson can buy an SD card preloaded with Raspbian, the barrier to entry becomes again zero.