[Edu-sig] A case against GUIs in intro CS :-)

[Laura Creighton]

I have often wondered if we didn't lose something when the first programming people learn
to do is no longer batch processing -- the sort I learned to do with cards.  At any rate,
I keep meeting people who have severe problems understanding how to write programs that
do not interact with a user at all.  They keep wanting to have 'conversations' with an
assumed 'program operator' ...  It is a fundamental conceptual problem, for some of them.
The notion that somebody could want to 'get data from here' without clicking on a mouse
for a filename at all stops some people cold, even though they have already had 1 or 2
introductory progamming courses.  For them, the _GUI_ is the computer, and the computer is
relentlessly interactive...

Laura