We aim higher these days
A couple of weeks ago, David Brin (reportedly) wrote an article on Salon, apparently lamenting about the lack of an inspiring way for kids to get into computing ... "... almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast."
Rafe Colburn took issue with Brin's article (which I haven't read because it's behind something at Salon). In the comments I've read at rc3 and other places around the Web, I haven't seen commentary that mentions what I think is a big reason why it's harder for kids to get started now than it was twenty years ago: we aim higher these days. When the coolest videogame you could see anywhere was Pong, and the most impressive application was Wordstar, it was pretty easy to imagine creating something like either of those, even with a limited language like BASIC.
Now, kids see and expect awesome graphics in viedogames, complex interfaces in iTunes, email and IM apps, and Firefox -- including myriad web apps out there -- and you simply can't create a beginner's programming language that could possibly make all of those things look doable. Sure, you could explain to a kid how to write Pong in Python, or Wordstar in Ruby, but the world has gone far beyond that. There's a huge gap between what it's easy for a beginner to imaging creating with a beginner's language, versus the games and apps whose capabilities and complexities they (as users) take for granted and want either to recreate or to exceed.
11:58:16 PM
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