Python for Kids

[Jeff Massung]

>Every single kid who learned HyperCard (especially me) and tried to go
>on to bigger and better things with it was immediately frustrated by
>its limitations.  There was a long and painful process of unlearning
>everything they'd ever done with HyperCard to actually be able to do
>anything useful.

Interesting. I first learned Basic, Pascal, C/C++, then Hypercard (it was
all we had at our school). So it is good to see the perspective from the
orther side.

>It's also a very bad way of thinking about programming -- the
>HyperTalk reference lists hundreds of "commands" that are bindings to
>specific functionality, rather than methods or functions; there's no
>good way to define a new kind of class, let alone inherit from an
>existing one; there are scads of subtly special syntaxes, the language
>is hard-wired into a vastly substandard development environment, and
>Apple has no intention AFAICT of supporting this under OSX.
>Abstraction?  Hah!

Definitely no disagreement here, I just thought that with the GUI idea of
Hypercard would help the learning process. It is interesting to learn the
exact opposite! I wonder why...? :)

>No offense to the poster of this message, but HyperCard was what
>taught me never to rely on commercial software :-) and I really feel
>strongly about discouraging its use (no matter what the context)

None taken ;), but I'd like to know why, is there psych. behind it? Failure
to see what is "really going on behind the curtains" that inhibits the child
later?

- Jeff Massung (jmassung at magpiesystems.com)
- Lead software engineer for Magpie Systems (www.magpiesystems.com)
- Bringing smart pigs and data analysis to the pipeline industry!