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Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS

Are these kids hacking on the Linux kernel or something? Of course not. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I even mentioned libc. There is more to an operating system than a kernel. In fact, this was an important part of my early computer education: when I was 12 (1994) I bought a copy of Slackware Linux because it had a free compiler (even Turbo Pascal was expensive for a 12 year-old). At the beginning I just typed some small C snippets that I could find in books in the library. Then I started reading shell scripts and found out that a lot of the system is controlled through shell scripts and started writing my own. Then I started reading through the source code of libraries to find out how things were implemented. At some point I got a Minix book (I was probably 16) at a discount at a book store. I started comparing the theory I read there and tried to find out how e.g. the Linux VMM differed from Minix. Don't underestimate how important it is for a kid to have access to such information. Only a small subset dive deeply into the system, but they will be the hackers of the future. But you have to awaken the interest by making easy to dive in. They will be using some app/language running on the OS. They don't need access to the OS source to do that. I think you underestimate how important access to the OS (in the widest sense) has been to the success of everyone from Google, Dropbox, and Facebook to the newest of startups.

bohol 12y ago
I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
  - bohol 12y ago
    No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows. It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing. And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualified user software exist on other platforms. Industrial, scientific, medical, music, film etc.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      No? Tiny? I'd love to know which games industry you think came before the games industry on Windows. Did a legion of Windows programmers appear overnight? Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making. Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.
      - bohol 12y ago
        The state of Linux is far more a hindrances for it's success as a learning tool than Windows ever was. I've been using Linux since '98, it's great for learning systems administration or networking. It's however lacking in most of the other areas of computing, those which yourself like many other apparently are quite ignorant of. I learned far more from windows than I ever did Linux, including advanced OS concepts. That Microsoft is coercing people to use Windows is the favorite conspiracy among Linux evangelists. The reality is that Linux isn't and never was very approachable. You might not be able to dive into the source code of Windows, but at least your not stuck trying to understand yet another build system. At least there are decent learning material so you don't need read the source code or scavenge through mailings list trying to find something other than "why do you want to do that". Or a countless other examples like it. I like Linux, I do. But you can't have your cake and it too. It's not as good as Windows if you want to have access to all areas of computing. Which is what you want when you teach computers to a wide verity of people. Maybe you should be more concerned that most ARM devices doesn't have working graphics acceleration for Linux desktop systems.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I don't think Win 10 is about teaching kids to code. But then I don't think the Pi is really about teaching kids to code either. The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone otherwise, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. It's just too damn complicated for most kids. The nerds get it, but expecting the average ten year old to learn Linux shell scripting or the fine points of Apache installation seems unrealistic to me. Win 10 on the Pi is about two things. The first is about edging Linux out of the education market. Teachers will indeed prefer Win 10 to Linux, for reasons that others have mentioned - especially if it comes with a basic dev toolchain. Even if that toolchain is very easy to use. The second is - I guess - selling Office 365 subscriptions on super-cheap hardware, and creating a whole new sub-PC market for Windows and Office. If I'm right, it's a clever move. It will give Windows and Office access to many new markets worldwide. Where MS hardware failed on price, the Pi version wins on price. It could be a very strong combination.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone [that "the Pi is really about teaching kids to code"], but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. // http://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ says that they designed it to enable kids to access a cheap platform on which it would be easy to code and that they considered the multimedia capabilities a good hook. Price was clearly a major factor in making the RPi accessible to all [UK] kids. Their inspiration was in part the BBC Micro series - which were certainly not inexpensive. RPi is cheaper than a second-hand Nintendo DS. In short, as I understood it, the RPi was about removing the cost barrier to kids having their own system on which to code and hack both hardware and software.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    But is Linux about teaching kids to code? I don't think it is. I spent more time on RH6.2 attempting to learn how the system worked and how the heck to make my rubbish graphics card run X than running egcs or g++ back in the day. There was terse documentation for all the GTK stuff, and it was particularly daunting if you had not written any advanced C or C++ (like me). I did manage to write some rubbish programs under Qt thanks to the excellent documentation and through sheer perseverance under KDE2 but today installing Visual Studio is incredibly easy. I ran Linux for years and still use it today for my Pi only but I think the INITIAL learning curve to use a system is less steep with Windows than Linux, particularly if you are presented with a CLI Linux login. If you are presented with a GUI then it may be different for a 6 year old but I wouldn't say that the Linux vs Windows discussion really takes into account how easy it is to get into programming on the platforms. (I know you can install gcc and get writing C/C++ really quickly but you can do the same with Visual Studio without understanding a package management system).
- Gurkenmaster 12y ago
  Do you think the servers of multiplayer games also run on windows?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. LOL on which planet did you live? The cracking and demoscene started way before MS DOS, with the C64, the Atari ST and the Amiga. Windows was super late to the game.
- emptybits 12y ago
  The cracking scene, demo scene, and games industry were all built long before Windows. C64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Atari. I think it's important we had a generation of instant-on machines that greeted a user with a command prompt and a programming environment. Even if you wanted to just play a game, you still found yourself LOADing, DIRing, SYSing, and maybe performing a soft-reset after a LOAD that triggered a system routine that now pointed somewhere else. There are things you'd learn after hours of playing and messing with games because, eventually, typing all this weird stuff at a command prompt made you wonder "how" or "what if". The metal and its registers and special calls were right there and you couldn't brick your machine in any way a cold boot couldn't fix, so next thing you know, your friend shows you if he POKEs this and then SYSes that, he could change the background color of the load screen. Cool. So now you need to one-up him so you spend a weekend messing around with NO TOOLS -- just a CLI -- and figure out if you POKE these other four places after LOADING and then SYS then you get unlimited lives. Of course the game crashing after a minute. And so it goes. But breaking things was encouraged because you'd instantly cold-boot and try again. I think we owe a huge debt to instant-on machines with a command prompt and some environment (BASIC or a hex monitor or, today, bash with root on Linux and maybe Python or whatever). Any project that tries to put environments like that into kids hands again gets my vote. Windows... less so.
  - bohol 12y ago
    I don't disagree over all, but I'm not sure it works that way anymore. Systems have become super complex and the measurement for what is impressive have gone up. I think the power of a lot of those early system was that they were "boxes", but still impressive enough to keep playing in that box. I think Linux is very much the opposite. You can do pretty much anything you want, but it can be very hard to get good results. If I wanted someone o have the same experience these days I'd probably put them in front of something like processing.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  > I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. There was certainly a significant Windows (and DOS) demoscene, but to say it was exclusively built on Windows is about as far as the truth as one can get. Emphasis on Windows really only picked up in the late 90's; throughout the 70's, 80's, and early 90's, most of the demoscene, game development, etc. revolved around non-Windows platforms (particularly BASIC-running toasters in the 70's-80's, followed by Amigas and Macintoshes throughout the 80's and early 90's). Windows 95 was the start of Windows becoming more popular for game development and multimedia production, but it took quite some time for Windows to displace the rest of the market (through Microsoft's monopolistic tactics, but that's another story). Until that point, there was DOS, but it was one of many contenders with relatively-equal footing only as far back as the late 80's at the earliest, before which DOS was more the purview of businesses buying IBM PCs alongside their IBM mainframes (in other words, about the most uncool computers one could possibly own). The reason DOS eventually caught on was very much because of how "open" (comparatively-speaking) it was compared to, say, Mac OS; the same subculture of BASIC programmers from the Commodore 64 days could make an easy transition to a similarly-minimalist environment requiring a lot of user intervention and therefore customization opportunity, much like how the world of GNU/Linux had been all the way up to the mainstream adoption of Android (and still is, though it's no longer an absolute necessity to be able to tinker with one's system like it was in the first half of the 2000's). This isn't to mention that Windows didn't fully penetrate the educational market until well into the 2000's; most schools had a large quantity of Apple hardware still in use, thus influencing educational development. This was much stronger when the idea of a "demoscene" was still really relevant. Now, the cracking world might have been different (I know DOS was a strong contender in the BBS subculture), but the latter two are very much not a product of Windows; far from it.
nmeofthestate 12y ago
For hardcore nerds like yourself there will still be Linux. I don't see it as an ominous development. And for old stick-in-the-mud people who never got into Linux like me, this could make doing stuff with a RPi much easier. (Edit: btw I'm using "hardcore nerd" as a compliment).
- zxcvcxz 12y ago
  How would you use a ras pi with windows installed on it? I'm assuming windows 10 is going to have a decent CLI that you're all going to have to learn and pretty soon all the windows programmers who never had time to learn the Linux command line will have plenty of time to learn the new windows command line.
  - new_hackers 12y ago
    Probably will be PowerShell, which isn't bad. It's probably a good shell for teaching because it is fairly consistent in its conventions.
  - mark-r 12y ago
    On an ARM processor I'd be surprised to see any kind of command shell at all. Certainly it wouldn't be the DOS based command window.
pjmlp 12y ago
When I started with computers in the mid-80's, so open source wasn't an option. None of the home computers systems was open source. We had computer magazines, and books to type stuff from. This is what is important, to have information how a given system works. I only jumped into GNU/Linux as a cheap way to have UNIX at home.
jarjoura 12y ago
Doesn't Visual Studio ship with full source code to it's C & C++ libraries?
chinpokomon 12y ago
I get what you are saying, but 12 year old you was 18 year old me. My first Linux distro was also Slackware, but I had cut my teeth on MS-DOS and Windows 3.0 - 95. I think that today's youth will embrace technology at the level it appeals to them. If educators embrace Windows because that is what they know, it is better that there is some exposure than none. The kids that are inspired are going to take it further than most instructors will ever understand.

bohol 12y ago

I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I do think the trend of iOS, Android and similar Windows environments is troubling. But if they ship Windows 10 on the RPi with something like QBasic and Visual Studio it's probably just as good a learning tool as Linux. Or even a better one considering the rest of the application ecosystem.

throwawayaway 12y ago
> The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. I think you mean commodore, or atari. Windows gaming came a long long time afterwards. It is more advanced in some ways but it does not beget OS programmers, like an open source OS does. If OS programmers die out, we're in very deep trouble.
- bohol 12y ago
  No, while nostalgic, the Commodore and Atari scene were tiny in comparison. Since the mid nineties people have learned graphics programming and reverse engineering primarily on Windows. It's not like OS programming is going away, but it has always been mostly a university thing. And you could say we already are in big trouble. Since the ecosystem for multimedia weren't (and isn't) very good on Linux a lot of qualified user software exist on other platforms. Industrial, scientific, medical, music, film etc.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    No? Tiny? I'd love to know which games industry you think came before the games industry on Windows. Did a legion of Windows programmers appear overnight? Audacity, Bitwig, QTractor and Ardour have made great strides - and that's merely stuff I know about. Userland software is quite beside the point I was making. Closed-source single OS dominance without an open source alternative would mean much worse trouble than the trouble we are already in. To avoid this, you need OS programmers, many of whom never get to University.
    - bohol 12y ago
      The state of Linux is far more a hindrances for it's success as a learning tool than Windows ever was. I've been using Linux since '98, it's great for learning systems administration or networking. It's however lacking in most of the other areas of computing, those which yourself like many other apparently are quite ignorant of. I learned far more from windows than I ever did Linux, including advanced OS concepts. That Microsoft is coercing people to use Windows is the favorite conspiracy among Linux evangelists. The reality is that Linux isn't and never was very approachable. You might not be able to dive into the source code of Windows, but at least your not stuck trying to understand yet another build system. At least there are decent learning material so you don't need read the source code or scavenge through mailings list trying to find something other than "why do you want to do that". Or a countless other examples like it. I like Linux, I do. But you can't have your cake and it too. It's not as good as Windows if you want to have access to all areas of computing. Which is what you want when you teach computers to a wide verity of people. Maybe you should be more concerned that most ARM devices doesn't have working graphics acceleration for Linux desktop systems.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
I don't think Win 10 is about teaching kids to code. But then I don't think the Pi is really about teaching kids to code either. The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone otherwise, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. It's just too damn complicated for most kids. The nerds get it, but expecting the average ten year old to learn Linux shell scripting or the fine points of Apache installation seems unrealistic to me. Win 10 on the Pi is about two things. The first is about edging Linux out of the education market. Teachers will indeed prefer Win 10 to Linux, for reasons that others have mentioned - especially if it comes with a basic dev toolchain. Even if that toolchain is very easy to use. The second is - I guess - selling Office 365 subscriptions on super-cheap hardware, and creating a whole new sub-PC market for Windows and Office. If I'm right, it's a clever move. It will give Windows and Office access to many new markets worldwide. Where MS hardware failed on price, the Pi version wins on price. It could be a very strong combination.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >The Pi Foundation has done a good job of persuading everyone [that "the Pi is really about teaching kids to code"], but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that a computer designed for kids from the ground up would look very different. // http://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/about/ says that they designed it to enable kids to access a cheap platform on which it would be easy to code and that they considered the multimedia capabilities a good hook. Price was clearly a major factor in making the RPi accessible to all [UK] kids. Their inspiration was in part the BBC Micro series - which were certainly not inexpensive. RPi is cheaper than a second-hand Nintendo DS. In short, as I understood it, the RPi was about removing the cost barrier to kids having their own system on which to code and hack both hardware and software.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  But is Linux about teaching kids to code? I don't think it is. I spent more time on RH6.2 attempting to learn how the system worked and how the heck to make my rubbish graphics card run X than running egcs or g++ back in the day. There was terse documentation for all the GTK stuff, and it was particularly daunting if you had not written any advanced C or C++ (like me). I did manage to write some rubbish programs under Qt thanks to the excellent documentation and through sheer perseverance under KDE2 but today installing Visual Studio is incredibly easy. I ran Linux for years and still use it today for my Pi only but I think the INITIAL learning curve to use a system is less steep with Windows than Linux, particularly if you are presented with a CLI Linux login. If you are presented with a GUI then it may be different for a 6 year old but I wouldn't say that the Linux vs Windows discussion really takes into account how easy it is to get into programming on the platforms. (I know you can install gcc and get writing C/C++ really quickly but you can do the same with Visual Studio without understanding a package management system).
Gurkenmaster 12y ago
Do you think the servers of multiplayer games also run on windows?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 12y ago
> The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. LOL on which planet did you live? The cracking and demoscene started way before MS DOS, with the C64, the Atari ST and the Amiga. Windows was super late to the game.
emptybits 12y ago
The cracking scene, demo scene, and games industry were all built long before Windows. C64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Atari. I think it's important we had a generation of instant-on machines that greeted a user with a command prompt and a programming environment. Even if you wanted to just play a game, you still found yourself LOADing, DIRing, SYSing, and maybe performing a soft-reset after a LOAD that triggered a system routine that now pointed somewhere else. There are things you'd learn after hours of playing and messing with games because, eventually, typing all this weird stuff at a command prompt made you wonder "how" or "what if". The metal and its registers and special calls were right there and you couldn't brick your machine in any way a cold boot couldn't fix, so next thing you know, your friend shows you if he POKEs this and then SYSes that, he could change the background color of the load screen. Cool. So now you need to one-up him so you spend a weekend messing around with NO TOOLS -- just a CLI -- and figure out if you POKE these other four places after LOADING and then SYS then you get unlimited lives. Of course the game crashing after a minute. And so it goes. But breaking things was encouraged because you'd instantly cold-boot and try again. I think we owe a huge debt to instant-on machines with a command prompt and some environment (BASIC or a hex monitor or, today, bash with root on Linux and maybe Python or whatever). Any project that tries to put environments like that into kids hands again gets my vote. Windows... less so.
- bohol 12y ago
  I don't disagree over all, but I'm not sure it works that way anymore. Systems have become super complex and the measurement for what is impressive have gone up. I think the power of a lot of those early system was that they were "boxes", but still impressive enough to keep playing in that box. I think Linux is very much the opposite. You can do pretty much anything you want, but it can be very hard to get good results. If I wanted someone o have the same experience these days I'd probably put them in front of something like processing.
yellowapple 12y ago
> I think you overestimate the need for access to the OS for learning things. The cracking scene, demoscene and games industry was almost exclusively built on Windows. A lot of that was just as, if not more, advanced as what a Linux programmer does. There was certainly a significant Windows (and DOS) demoscene, but to say it was exclusively built on Windows is about as far as the truth as one can get. Emphasis on Windows really only picked up in the late 90's; throughout the 70's, 80's, and early 90's, most of the demoscene, game development, etc. revolved around non-Windows platforms (particularly BASIC-running toasters in the 70's-80's, followed by Amigas and Macintoshes throughout the 80's and early 90's). Windows 95 was the start of Windows becoming more popular for game development and multimedia production, but it took quite some time for Windows to displace the rest of the market (through Microsoft's monopolistic tactics, but that's another story). Until that point, there was DOS, but it was one of many contenders with relatively-equal footing only as far back as the late 80's at the earliest, before which DOS was more the purview of businesses buying IBM PCs alongside their IBM mainframes (in other words, about the most uncool computers one could possibly own). The reason DOS eventually caught on was very much because of how "open" (comparatively-speaking) it was compared to, say, Mac OS; the same subculture of BASIC programmers from the Commodore 64 days could make an easy transition to a similarly-minimalist environment requiring a lot of user intervention and therefore customization opportunity, much like how the world of GNU/Linux had been all the way up to the mainstream adoption of Android (and still is, though it's no longer an absolute necessity to be able to tinker with one's system like it was in the first half of the 2000's). This isn't to mention that Windows didn't fully penetrate the educational market until well into the 2000's; most schools had a large quantity of Apple hardware still in use, thus influencing educational development. This was much stronger when the idea of a "demoscene" was still really relevant. Now, the cracking world might have been different (I know DOS was a strong contender in the BBS subculture), but the latter two are very much not a product of Windows; far from it.

nmeofthestate 12y ago

For hardcore nerds like yourself there will still be Linux. I don't see it as an ominous development. And for old stick-in-the-mud people who never got into Linux like me, this could make doing stuff with a RPi much easier. (Edit: btw I'm using "hardcore nerd" as a compliment).

zxcvcxz 12y ago
How would you use a ras pi with windows installed on it? I'm assuming windows 10 is going to have a decent CLI that you're all going to have to learn and pretty soon all the windows programmers who never had time to learn the Linux command line will have plenty of time to learn the new windows command line.
- new_hackers 12y ago
  Probably will be PowerShell, which isn't bad. It's probably a good shell for teaching because it is fairly consistent in its conventions.
- mark-r 12y ago
  On an ARM processor I'd be surprised to see any kind of command shell at all. Certainly it wouldn't be the DOS based command window.

pjmlp 12y ago

When I started with computers in the mid-80's, so open source wasn't an option. None of the home computers systems was open source. We had computer magazines, and books to type stuff from. This is what is important, to have information how a given system works. I only jumped into GNU/Linux as a cheap way to have UNIX at home.

jarjoura 12y ago

Doesn't Visual Studio ship with full source code to it's C & C++ libraries?

chinpokomon 12y ago

I get what you are saying, but 12 year old you was 18 year old me. My first Linux distro was also Slackware, but I had cut my teeth on MS-DOS and Windows 3.0 - 95. I think that today's youth will embrace technology at the level it appeals to them. If educators embrace Windows because that is what they know, it is better that there is some exposure than none. The kids that are inspired are going to take it further than most instructors will ever understand.