Isn't this what Squeak guys are (kind of) aiming at? OLPC comes with Etoys, in which children can easily write and modify graphical apps.
What's interesting is that their environment inherently supports concurrency. If kids learn concurrent/parallel programming from the beginning, maybe they'll make better software suitable for this multicore/cloud age later.
mac's come with sqlite3, python, a terminal, a decent developing environment (extra cd). it's probably not a big deal for windows folks to download languages and developing environments, too, to say nothing of ubuntu.
the web is a trove of treasure tutorials. open source and the web are thriving, the community is more inclusive and inviting than ever. more and more i run into artists, non-video game players, females, mechanical or electrical engineers and young folks discovering the joy of programming (arduino, processing, openframeworks, scratch and python are examples from recent interactions i've had).
video game consoles might be less programmer-inviting than they used to be, but they're also catering to a more varied and more expecting audience than they used to.
Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces.
Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that interesting is different today than it was when I started programming. I doubt today's 10 year old would be impressed by a text adventure...unfortunately...
today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days.
as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though.
there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was available when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.
I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language.
The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class.
It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
" I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language."
I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on.
Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.
I'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age.
I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.
It's not as accessible as BASIC on a TI calculator, where many kids are introduced to programming. I don't think it's a coincidence that the situation was similar on Commodores/Ataris.
Deciding that you need a programming language installed and then picking one and installing it is a very big step. It was a fluke that many of the people posting in this thread discovered programming. They stumbled upon the editor, tapped out a couple lines, and something happened. Cool!
Python is certainly accessible to an experienced developer, but a 10-year-old's curiosity is superficial. They need to tinker and receive instant gratification without the barriers of setting up an environment. Programming isn't integrated and exposed in a dead-simple way to foster experimentation these days.
Well it is a matter of perspective. If you're a kid and your family has a Mac you just sit down and type python and you're in. Whereas how many 10 year olds even today have graphing calculators? Do kids even use calculators any more or is it all "new maths"?
gaius, you and i are on the same wavelength. the old skool calculators and video games is actually a very narrow approachability (as someone who never had either nor was much interested in either), but is significantly more present on this site. however the new skool method--macs for trendy teens and college folk, or processing for artists, or good old scratch and alice for young kids--is much more present seizure-inducing social network sites, or off the web scene altogether. the anecdotal data here is significantly skewed. the real power of approachability is the variety of people doing technical projects now who otherwise were too intimidated in the past.
You believe it's skewed because it doesn't fit your particular model of world. The fact is, an entire generation of hackers got their start through tinkering on a gaming console in their pre-teen years.
I think you're just so out of touch with how a 10-year-old learns that you can't comprehend what the article is addressing. A kid that age doesn't pick up programming the same way that a person in their 20's does. He's still mastering reading, figuring out the fundamentals of his operating system, and making real-world analogies for objects on his computer that you might already have at 24. He doesn't understand what an algorithm is, he doesn't even really know what a programming language does or what role it plays. He doesn't know algebra.
Most kids are not scholarly. They don't seek out information and work through tutorials. They're never going to hear about alice/scratch/squeak/LÖVE. They stumble upon things and their curiosity drives them, but their attention span is relatively small. They do things because they're fun and not because they want to learn.
When you began programming you probably read books and tutorials, followed-up on documentation, and relied heavily on examples. Learning through your teenage years is evolutionary. It's almost all trial-and-error at that stage. Computers are a incredibly complex place to start, that's why so many of these anecdotes are about programming BASIC.
Interestingly mobile phones used to ship with a tool for programming your own ringtones. My brother used to do it all the time. Nokia at least stopped bundling that when they discovered it was actually possible to sell ringtones.
...oh, and personally, I can relate. If it weren't for the Apple IIe in my middle-school math teacher's class room, I wouldn't be a programmer today.