Zed, you're awesome. With that said -- it's who you're teaching that lets you say this.
Right now there are people who know they want to learn programming coming hell or high water, and you do a damn fine job teaching them.
There are also a whole lot of people who might want to write apps, but do not want to go through the pain of learning programming.
The audience of Scratch, from MIT, is the narrow end of this giant wedge of people. They have nowhere to go from there because nobody else does it that way.
I miss the Apple II. It actually had a few on-ramps for people like that. Those on-ramps are pretty much dead now, though I have no idea why.
The guy writing this article isn't aiming at your set of programmers. He's aiming at all the people who aren't programming but would love to be able to build apps of one kind or another. There are a lot of them, and even a lot who could, and who we do a terrible job of teaching.
Right now there are people who know they want to learn programming coming hell or high water, and you do a damn fine job teaching them.
There are also a whole lot of people who might want to write apps, but do not want to go through the pain of learning programming.
The audience of Scratch, from MIT, is the narrow end of this giant wedge of people. They have nowhere to go from there because nobody else does it that way.
I miss the Apple II. It actually had a few on-ramps for people like that. Those on-ramps are pretty much dead now, though I have no idea why.
The guy writing this article isn't aiming at your set of programmers. He's aiming at all the people who aren't programming but would love to be able to build apps of one kind or another. There are a lot of them, and even a lot who could, and who we do a terrible job of teaching.