What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Mario Figueiredo <marfig at gmail.com> wrote:
> "I want to become a programmer so I can make games" is, on the vast
> majority of cases, the quote of someone who will never become a
> programmer. Why should teachers reward that kind of thought?

How about "I want to become a programmer so my brother, 2.5 years
older than me, won't be better than me any more"? Should that kind of
thinking be rewarded? Because that's how I got started. My brother was
being taught the basics of programming, I was jealous (being the
second child will tend to produce that), and so at six years old, I
started learning to code. And then a few years later, I wanted to
learn C because my brother didn't know it (we'd both learned BASIC),
and since I didn't have a C compiler, I learned 8086 Assembly Language
instead, using DEBUG.EXE. Largely out of jealousy.

I hope I've gained a little maturity since then...

ChrisA