Slashdotter looking for kids' programming language

Richmond Mathewson geradamas at yahoo.com
Thu Dec 11 05:42:30 EST 2008


Bill Marriot wrote:

"Actually, it would be great if a LOT of people suggested Rev, and in some 
depth, according to their passion! (Richmond, this seems RIGHT up your 
alley!)"

and, of course, the raving ego-maniac rises to the bait.

"The thread is filled with a lot of people who are suggesting Ruby, 
Python, even C++! Strikes me as verging on child abuse to subject a 14-yo to that, but who am I to say? :)"

Ooh, Yes, let's talk about "child abuse' (being myself a victim of it;
many children abuse ME every day):

My 16 year-old has just suffered 'deep, lasting trauma' at the hands of 
PASCAL 5.5. [actually, the real trauma was caused by having his Dad 
sitting beside him telling him awful "when I was at Durham" stories, but I
 digress ] But for a very simple reason: countries like Bulgaria (cannot 
decide whether it qualifies as third-world or simply 'turd' world) are not
 prepared to spend money on anything vaguely smacking of education. And 
any old fool can download FREEdos and bung it on an old piece of junk 
along with the GEM GUI - I know, I did it myself in about 15 minutes: 
comes with PASCAL inside.

Now, BACK TO THE FUTURE; I have urged, several times, in varying degrees 
of linguistic 'heat', RR to re-release Runtime Revolution 2 FREE version.
I would be straight up the road at the Ministry of Misinformation (whoops, 
Education) pushing RR like nobody's business. Now, while the Bulgarian 
government may be a bunch of cheap-jacks, and the Bulgarians may pride 
themselves on being kings of software piracy (Yup!); I believe that 
re-releasing RR 2 would actually pay off; not just in Bulg. but 
world-wide.

Of course RR 2.0.1 could be revamped with a tedious start-up screen that 
delayed you for 3-4 minutes while it sung the praises of RR 3.

After all, one can download a ten-lines-of-code-limited version of 
Metacard for WIN / MAC / LIN right now (I know, just bunged it on my new 
toy; a P4 1.7 GHz running Ubuntu 8.04.1). However, as we all know, 
the GUI of Metacard is not very kiddy-friendly.

I would be more than happy to pitch in my alternative revTools stack 
I made for 2.0!

Were I part of RR I would be urging a huge "education push", call it 
"outreach", call it what you like.

Judy Perry wrote:

"Someone might want to suggest Rev..."

To which the inevitable reply is; "Why don't you?"

The more people who vote for RR the better.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.
____________________________________________________________

A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
____________________________________________________________


      



More information about the use-livecode mailing list