I remember learning to program in Logo on a Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. Even back then, I was decomposing my code into functions, playing around with recursion, etc. 30 years later, I was presenting to my son's 4th grade class, and was getting reasonable questions on CSS, github, etc.
The basic concepts behind programming just aren't that hard if they're accessible to elementary school students.
Where things do get tricky is when you start to scale upwards in terms of complexity, volume, and duration of service. But even then, it's all too common for engineering efforts to overestimate the need for those things. That then leads to architectural choices that not only make the system more difficult to work with, but also likely fails to meet the initial targets.
I disagree, programming is hard from the perspective of understanding the problems that are needed to be solved.
I agree, programming is easy, if the language allows you to formulate code that is logical and doesn't bite you because of "undefined behaviours" or "implementation defined behaviours".
Logo was and is useful in providing you with specific conceptual patterns for writing code, but does not give the necessary abilities to provide solutions to problems via code.
One can learn the features of Calculus and how to solve Calculus problems. but it is a different matter to learn how to use it as a tool to solve real world problems. This is a different subject altogether. In my undergraduate days, oh so many decades ago, a common refrain from us engineering undergraduates was how often we would be taught something with no reference to how to use that tool for real world problems.
As the years have passed by, I have been pleased to see that in some areas, this disconnect between learning a tool and using that tool for solving real world problems has strongly diminished. There is some excellent material now available that goes a long way to solving this problem. Kudos to those men and women who teach these courses.
It's not.
I remember learning to program in Logo on a Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. Even back then, I was decomposing my code into functions, playing around with recursion, etc. 30 years later, I was presenting to my son's 4th grade class, and was getting reasonable questions on CSS, github, etc.
The basic concepts behind programming just aren't that hard if they're accessible to elementary school students.
Where things do get tricky is when you start to scale upwards in terms of complexity, volume, and duration of service. But even then, it's all too common for engineering efforts to overestimate the need for those things. That then leads to architectural choices that not only make the system more difficult to work with, but also likely fails to meet the initial targets.