Dick Karpinski wrote:

"I guess my general claim is that computers should best be used in the
classroom, not even as a tool, but rather as a medium. Like paper or
film or audio tape. We don't go to the theatre to watch the projector,
but rather what it projects and the sound it plays. Still, there are
limitless opportunities for schooling to be improved, and students to be
placed more centrally in the process, which involve computers in some way."

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or
like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can
dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that
cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many
tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for
representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely
investigated. Even more important, it is fun, and therefore intrinsically
worth doing.
... Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the
score, whose interpretation amplifies our reach and lifts our spirit.
Leonardo da Vinci called music ``the shaping of the invisible,'' and his
phrase is even more apt as a description of software.

The above is a quote from Alan Kay's article ``Computer Software'' in
Scientific American, September 1984.

I like Alan's quote very much (it is on my website -
http://www.toontalk.com/English/adultask.htm ). My question is why after 17
years do so few people understand that that is what is so special about
computer programming. Why are there so few actively trying to spread the
power and joy of programming to the wider world?  Why is it such a hard
sell?

Best,

-ken kahn