interesting thread "The Little Coder's Predicament"

[Alex Rice]

http://www.advogato.org/article/671.html

the gist of it is

"""
In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64, hours after 
purchasing it, with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the 
pattern of notes spewing from the speaker grille in an endless loop. 
You were part of the movement to help machines sing! You were a 
programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC. They know what I'm talking 
about. And the TI-994A guys don't need to say a word, because the TI 
could say it for them!

Yes, there are burgeoning free SDKs for many of these platforms. But 
they are obscure and most children have no means of actually deploying 
or executing the code on their own hardware! This is obvious to us all 
and likely doesn't seem such a big deal. But ask yourself what might 
have happened had you not had access to a programming language on an 
Atari 800 or a Commodore. You tell me if this is a predicament.

It turns out, most of the kids in my neighborhood are exposed to coding 
through the TI calculator. A handful of languages are available on the 
TI and its processor is interesting enough to evoke some curiousity. 
But this hasn't spread to its PDA big brothers, where young people 
could have more exposure to programming. And undoubtedly the utility of 
a language on the Palm, Pocket PC and others would be useful to many.

I should mention that Windows is equipped with its own scripting host 
for developing in JScript and VBScript. But the use of the scripting 
host is (I believe) under-documented and limited for beginners. Try 
doing something useful in a script without using Server.CreateObject. 
Let's not let kids touch the COM objects, please!
"""

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com