[Edu-sig] Articles of possible interest

[Steve Morris]

Guido van Rossum writes:
 > Interestingly enough, I believe that programming itself,
 > i.e. expressing the intended operation of a computer program, is best
 > done through text.  I guess that means that I believe that text
 > (symbols) is more powerful than images; while a picture may be worth a
 > thousand words, in my experience, most meaningful collections of a
 > thousand words are hard to capture in a picture.  (You can also see
 > a program as a two-dimensional picture made up out of symbols.)

As humans language is our primary tool. It is not surprising that
computer language should be a natural way of expressing
algorithms. Written language has driven thousands of years of
development. I am often puzzled why people think that now that
computers can draw pretty pictures and a mouse can click on them
language should become an inappropriate way of communicating with a
computer.

GUIs are critiaccly important but they are not everything.