Aha, but there's the catch! RPi was supposed to be in the spirit of the BBC Micro. Cheap, accessible, in every school. But the Micro had a ready to go built-in programming language, didn't it? It was pretty simple to teach a kid to write 10 PRINT "HELLO" / 20 GOTO 10 and see their eyes light up within a few seconds of turning the thing on.
10 PRINT HELLO is slightly more obscure on a Linux desktop. This is where I see RPi falling down in the educational market and it turning into another hobbyist breadboard.
Not only that, but the serial port, user port, Econet etc were incredibly simple to use, both as hardware, and how you addressed them from BASIC. The RPi has USB and Ethernet...
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They should have resurrected the BBC Micro, that's what they should have done. Kids these days...
Aha, but there's the catch! RPi was supposed to be in the spirit of the BBC Micro. Cheap, accessible, in every school. But the Micro had a ready to go built-in programming language, didn't it? It was pretty simple to teach a kid to write 10 PRINT "HELLO" / 20 GOTO 10 and see their eyes light up within a few seconds of turning the thing on.
10 PRINT HELLO is slightly more obscure on a Linux desktop. This is where I see RPi falling down in the educational market and it turning into another hobbyist breadboard.
Not only that, but the serial port, user port, Econet etc were incredibly simple to use, both as hardware, and how you addressed them from BASIC. The RPi has USB and Ethernet...