Is RR too easy? Or too hard? (was) Is RunRev marketed to developers mainly?

[marty]

Is it true that most programmers say that hypercard isn't  
programming?  Do they say that about RR?  I'm running into that issue  
a little bit.

Some of my students (8th grade and up) think that RR is not a "real"  
programming language.  Why?  It's too easy!  They have the notion --  
shared by a good portion of the general public -- that programming is  
incredibly difficult to do, hard to learn, and mastered only by  
geeks.  Thus, since making things (even executables) using RR is so  
easy, it must not be programming.  This viewpoint is especially  
expressed by students who have dabbled in other languages, like java.

On the other side of the aisle, I'd like to begin urging other  
teachers to begin making their own software to use with their  
classes.  But they think it's too hard!  (Granted, most of them  
haven't really tried it -- they hear words like "programming" or  
"writing software" and shy away.)

Sigh....
   - marty

--
Marty Billingsley
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools


Recently, william humphrey wrote:
> Since my only experience in programming is with hypercard (and most
> programmers say that isn't programming) and with web stuff like PHP
> JAVAscript which has thousands of carefully indexed examples that  
> you can
> just snip and paste into your projects then I am really not the one to
> answer this question.
>