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> Eben Upton, one of the creators of the Raspberry Pi, > shared with us the brilliant insight that many young > people used to have to “choose not to pr

by h2s 14y ago

> Eben Upton, one of the creators of the Raspberry Pi, > shared with us the brilliant insight that many young > people used to have to “choose not to program” when > they turned their computers on, in order to play games What a quote. I remember this. My family had an Amstrad CPC 464, and when you booted it up, this is what it said: Amstrad 128k Microcomputer (v3) © 1985 Amstrad Computer Electronics plc and Locomotive Software Ltd. BASIC 1.1 Ready The very next thing that appeared was the text cursor, the assumption being that you would now begin to type code. You could choose not to program by putting a game cassette in the drive, holding Shift+Enter, and pressing play. But by default, you were programming. I love that the Pi attempts to revive this for today's kids. At the moment I think the closest they come to anything resembling code is if they use Firefox or Chrome and accidentally stumble into the developer tools.

simonh 14y ago
If you think about it, a shell prompt is just as much of an invitation to code. It's only really the GUI that changed this.
- drbawb 14y ago
  I agree that the GUI is the likely culprit. Though, as far as hacking goes, I'd almost prefer a BASIC prompt [or `irb`, `idle`, or any other number of modern REPLs] as opposed to a shell prompt. I can hack away at bash scripts... but bash just doesn't seem as warm and inviting as BASIC was. I think part of that is: shells are _primarily_ an interface to your filesystem. They offer IO redirection and the ability to run arbitrary executables. While their scripting facilities are certainly "complete", and plenty usable, I'd disagree that they're designed for it. When I fudge my fingers writing some Ruby, Go, Python, or Perl, the compiler or interpreter is usually pretty helpful in guiding me to my mistake. Often times it's also helpful in _suggesting_ the means to fix that mistake. When shell scripting goes _wrong_, (as it often _will_ for a complete novice), I don't think the shell is as helpful in correcting the mistake. That's my $.02 anyways.

by h2s 14y ago

simonh 14y ago

If you think about it, a shell prompt is just as much of an invitation to code. It's only really the GUI that changed this.

drbawb 14y ago
I agree that the GUI is the likely culprit. Though, as far as hacking goes, I'd almost prefer a BASIC prompt [or `irb`, `idle`, or any other number of modern REPLs] as opposed to a shell prompt. I can hack away at bash scripts... but bash just doesn't seem as warm and inviting as BASIC was. I think part of that is: shells are _primarily_ an interface to your filesystem. They offer IO redirection and the ability to run arbitrary executables. While their scripting facilities are certainly "complete", and plenty usable, I'd disagree that they're designed for it. When I fudge my fingers writing some Ruby, Go, Python, or Perl, the compiler or interpreter is usually pretty helpful in guiding me to my mistake. Often times it's also helpful in _suggesting_ the means to fix that mistake. When shell scripting goes _wrong_, (as it often _will_ for a complete novice), I don't think the shell is as helpful in correcting the mistake. That's my $.02 anyways.