IMO, this is a beautiful article. The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to se

IMO, this is a beautiful article. The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two." I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought the computer alive for me. Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator. I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much more. Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to teach her how to program. For me, programming is a big part of life! Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees the value in this.