I know this isn't really your main point, but I think you're probably selling short the activity of typing in code from a magazine. Firstly, the act of typing i

I know this isn't really your main point, but I think you're probably selling short the activity of typing in code from a magazine. Firstly, the act of typing in and of itself is an advantage in the task of learning to use computers. Secondly, no-one ever typed a program in perfectly, you would have to debug the program when you made a type. Sometimes the typo would create a syntax error and your interpreter would point you directly to the offending line. Other times the typo would result in still valid syntax, but your program would crash, and the interpreter might point you in the right direction, or might not. Lastly your typo might create a bug that just made the program function incorrectly. Hands up everyone that spent a day searching for the line that had a less than rather than a greater than sign typed in! The act of debugging these very real problems (without even talking about errors in the as-printed code!) is a very real introduction to programming. Lastly, and most importantly, if you were into computers, uyou inevitably encountered code that was designed for the BASIC dialect of another computer. To make it run on yours, you have to read the code, understand what it does, and then modify it to use commands (typically graphics commands) from your computer's own dialect to make it work. At this point you're no longer even looking like you're just typing in code - it's full-on programming. At one point in my life, I carried around the information necessary to translate basic programs between TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodre-64 and TI 99/4A BASIC dialects. We have lost this heritage. You don't need to type in code, you just download it from the 'Net. That means no slow reading of the code, no debugging typos, and no attempts to transfer code from one environment to another (as most development environments these days have got pretty good at virtualising the underlying system such that it presents a consistent interface to the programmer - my Javascript webpage generally works equally well in Safari, Chrome or IE)