On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel@merlintec.com wrote:

I have just watched the talk "It's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach" by Zed A. Shaw and he is very critical of Bret Victor's ideas, and also mentioned "Squeak Toys" and Scratch as examples of fallacies.

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http://oredev.org/2012/sessions/its-not-you-its-them-why-programming-languag...

Though I disagree with nearly everything he says, it was still an interesting talk. I think that in many cases he subtly misunderstood some concepts. His complaint about the lack of formal studies, on the other hand, is entirely valid.

An example of his misunderstanding: he shows Bret saying "if a programmer can't see something, then she can't understand it". Zed then complains about mixing text and drawings and using rectangles as a problem domain while the important things are concepts like "for". I am with Bret on this one: if a person can't "see" how a "for" works, they won't understand it. Most people who get good at programming as it is now can see it perfectly in their own heads. Having a visual representation animated on the screen will help the other people. Zed just ignored the first case of seeing and says the second case is a fallacy because "normal" people have trouble switching between linguistic and visual modes.

-- Jecel

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I watched this also and found it interesting,

I have seen Bret Victors stuff and found them a little lacking in the abstract side of programming.

Much of computing hard to show as graphic. Graphics is good up to a certain limit where the complexity in the graphics is as hard to grasp as the language complexity in question.

From my own experience I learned Basic almost 30 years ago typing in

listings from magazines. I learned of 'for loops' etc but was confounded by other programming languages that did not rely on line numbers and 'goto'.

I had a hard time learning Smalltalk later because I did not see where the program was. I did not understand how the program executed, and it was hard using the tools because they required a understanding of how the program worked. I was intrigued by this system that was so elusive and strangely powerful. When I finally understood the basics it was very rewarding and I felt I had accomplished something.

I do not think the general population will pursuit programming in it's current form thought, It is kind of like sudoku or cross word puzzles. It attracts a part of the population.

The next big leap in computer use will probably entail a totally different use of computers, where the computer will be a full blown AI and the mulling of the computer internals are of very little interest but for specialists.

Karl