I came across a great article on Salon today regarding the decline of “prgroamming you can see”. I’ve often lamented that when I learned to program, machines were slow enough to see them doing stuff: iterating loops, optimizing code etc… Here’s an exceprt:
But all of this misses the point. Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting — and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper — say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.
Filed under: techno-junk, techno-links
