Does turtle graphics have the wrong associations?

[Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

> > Who is your target audience?
> From: "Alf P. Steinbach" <al... at start.no>
> Someone intelligent who doesn't know anything or very much about
> programming and wants to learn general programming.

I think of what a computer *does* as data processing, and then
programing is simply telling the computer what data processing to
do. In calculator mode, you just tell the computer one step at a
time and immediately see the result before giving the next command.
In program mode, you tell the computer the whole sequences of steps
before the computer does even the first, which requires planning
the whole sequence in your mind ahead of time. Lisp's REP allows
you to use calculator mode when doing a dry run, then just wrap
PROG around it and viola you have a program of all the steps
together, thus bridging the gap between calculator and program mode
painlessly.

The two "hard" things about programming are syntax and planning.
REP gets rid of the need to plan in your mind before writing the
code, but you're still stuck with the syntax. My proposed no-syntax
IDE *also* gets rid of the need to bother with any
programming-language syntax. I've been proposing it for years, but
nobody has shown any interest, so I'm spending my time on other
things, but sometime in the next several months I am very likely to
go ahead and implement no-syntax IDE as part of
http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco.

> I assume an intelligent reader, someone who doesn't balk at a few
> technical terms here and there.

There's a **major** difference between the ability to figure out
complex puzzles and the ability to memorize jargon. Case in point:
I placed top-five in Putnam math context despite disability whereby
it was very difficult for me to memorize vocabulary/jargon. Then I
flunked out of graduate school because suddenly I was expected to
(but unable to) memorize ten definitions/lemmas to solve each
homework problem.

Ideally, with either somebody like me with memorization disability,
or a very young child who just naturally by age has trouble
learning more than one concept or term simultaneously, you should
introduce only one concept or term at a time, and exerecise the
person's mind with that concept or term for a while before moving
to the next.

> It's like the difference between driving a car and designing one.
> You don't need an engineering degree to drive a car. :-)

Sure some humans can be trained like pigeons to do the motions of
driving a car through a fixed course without having the slightest
concept of what's really happening. But to be able to respond
appropriately to new situations, it really helps to understand that
the brake pedal does *not* stop the car, it merely pulls a lever
that presses a plate against a wheel causing excess friction
causing the wheel to gradualy slow down, which is connected to the
tires causing *them* to resist motion of car against road, which on
non-slippery surfaces and with *gentle* braking results in the car
slowing down, but with **sudden** pressure on brake, or on slick
surfaces, the wheels stop turning completely and simply slide
against the roadway, causing loss of control of both yaw and
momentum, so suddenly your whole car is spinning about a vertical
axis as well as no longer going around the road-curve but instead
veering in a straight line across opposing traffic lanes or over
the edge of the "S curve" of the Bay Bridge and then 200 feet down
to a rather violent meeting with Yerba Buena Island.

I hate that "CHECK ENGINE" light, because there's usually no way
the driver of the vehicle actually *can* check the engine in any
meaningful way to determine why the light is on. I think it really
means "check" in the sense of a cloak-room, where you "check" your
raincoat and umbrella by handing them to a clerk, thus you really
do "check" your automobile by handing it over to a mechanic.

<silly>By the way, I don't want Python running on my Macintosh,
       because it might eat my mouse.</silly>