Because when you are older, people treat programming as talent and not as skill to be learned.
So if you don't come into it already knowing how to think, you will be written off as "not technical type" or some such. And you will write yourself off too.
Pointers don't matter at all. Loops and ifs matter a lot.
I certainly agree with that, but I also believe that the "writing off" is a the direct result of a system that takes it upon itself to distill the utter chaos of human knowledge into a learnable "system" that can be fed to humans of different ability levels.
"Teaching kids computing through iPad apps" sounds like more systematic reduction. The kids that don't get it won't care, and the kids that do get it would have got regular computing, too.
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Because when you are older, people treat programming as talent and not as skill to be learned.
So if you don't come into it already knowing how to think, you will be written off as "not technical type" or some such. And you will write yourself off too.
Pointers don't matter at all. Loops and ifs matter a lot.
I certainly agree with that, but I also believe that the "writing off" is a the direct result of a system that takes it upon itself to distill the utter chaos of human knowledge into a learnable "system" that can be fed to humans of different ability levels.
"Teaching kids computing through iPad apps" sounds like more systematic reduction. The kids that don't get it won't care, and the kids that do get it would have got regular computing, too.