PEP0238 lament

[Mikael Olofsson]

On 25-Jul-2001 Duncan Booth wrote:
 >  When it comes down to it, real beginners (5 to 7 years old?) will have been
 >  told that if you divide 9 by 2 you get 4 with 1 left over. Which is EXACTLY
 >  what you get at present. Floating point is a MUCH more sophisticated 
 >  concept which, as has been shown repeatedly on this newsgroup, is hard even
 >  for most programming professionals.

How many five to seven years old children write programs? They are 
typically in the process of learning to read and write their native 
language. My son Erik will be 6 this autumn. He knows most letters, 
but mixes them up often. He can recognize his own name in writing, but 
he can hardly write it. Imagining him writing even a "hello world" (or 
rather "hej världen") is impossible. 

I know of one exceptional kid who could read before he was four. He 
recognized cars by their name at the age of two. Everyone I know who
knows him agrees that he is the most intelligent kid they've met. Still,
I don't think he would have been able to start to program at the age of 
seven. He is now nine or ten. I don't know wheather he does any 
programming today, but there is a computer in their house and both his
parents are qualified engineers, so he certainly has the opportunity 
to do so.

I think it's more likely to find programming beginners in the age of 
ten years and up. The fact that the keywords in Python (as in most 
programming languages I know of) are in English would probably pose a
(perhaps slight) problem for the young beginners for whom English is 
not their native tounge. Those newbies know about rationals and they 
know about decimal notation. Well, perhaps not at 10 years, but at 12. 
For those young beginners, however, programming could very well be a 
way to learn both math and English (as a second language), among other 
things.

/Mikael

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E-Mail:  Mikael Olofsson <mikael at isy.liu.se>
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Date:    25-Jul-2001
Time:    10:24:00

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