There's a couple of points about modern programming systems.
BASIC was interpreted, and not object orientated. You'd have a book, and that book would contain every keyword, with a description of what it did, and some example code.
So you'd buy magazines or a book, you'd type out the programs in those books, you'd debug what you'd typed, you'd modify what you'd done, and then you'd start creating new programs. You'd write a little program, and then realise that you needed to do X; so you'd read the book and find the instruction for X, and you'd grok the example and write it in your program and debug.
Where is that workflow, that learning journey, recreated today? Perhaps with the "learn X the hard way" series?
Also, most people here are either technically brilliant or at least proficient. Now imagine the general population. These are people who just don't know how to plug in a printer. (In the days when computers had parallel ports and serial ports you could not plug the printer into the wrong port. You just had to look at the cable, and look at the computer, and try to mash the connector into all the ports. It would only fit one, and it would only fit one way. Yet I was seen as some kind of genius, by more than one person, because I could plug a printer in.) Or these are people who will not, seemingly cannot, read and act upon a short simple error message.
I love to think that maybe a bit of programming / coding teaching could change that, but I'm not sure it will.
Finally:
> Learning to code is learning to use logic and reason, and express your intent in a consistent, understandable, repeatable way.
Author uses "coding" and "programming" in weird ways. Normally programming is the design process, with pseudo-code and flowcharts and jackson structured programming charts and etc, while coding is just taking that and writing it in some language. Maybe I'm showing my age and the words are now used in a different manner, but it threw me for a while.
>Normally programming is the design process, with pseudo-code and flowcharts and jackson structured programming charts and etc, while coding is just taking that and writing it in some language.
That sounds more like software engineering to me. Most people do indeed use the words 'programming' and 'coding' interchangeably.
BASIC was interpreted, and not object orientated. You'd have a book, and that book would contain every keyword, with a description of what it did, and some example code.
So you'd buy magazines or a book, you'd type out the programs in those books, you'd debug what you'd typed, you'd modify what you'd done, and then you'd start creating new programs. You'd write a little program, and then realise that you needed to do X; so you'd read the book and find the instruction for X, and you'd grok the example and write it in your program and debug.
Where is that workflow, that learning journey, recreated today? Perhaps with the "learn X the hard way" series?
Also, most people here are either technically brilliant or at least proficient. Now imagine the general population. These are people who just don't know how to plug in a printer. (In the days when computers had parallel ports and serial ports you could not plug the printer into the wrong port. You just had to look at the cable, and look at the computer, and try to mash the connector into all the ports. It would only fit one, and it would only fit one way. Yet I was seen as some kind of genius, by more than one person, because I could plug a printer in.) Or these are people who will not, seemingly cannot, read and act upon a short simple error message.
I love to think that maybe a bit of programming / coding teaching could change that, but I'm not sure it will.
Finally:
> Learning to code is learning to use logic and reason, and express your intent in a consistent, understandable, repeatable way.
Author uses "coding" and "programming" in weird ways. Normally programming is the design process, with pseudo-code and flowcharts and jackson structured programming charts and etc, while coding is just taking that and writing it in some language. Maybe I'm showing my age and the words are now used in a different manner, but it threw me for a while.