
Free tool offers 'easy' coding  - rami
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6647011.stm
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That is a lot like the programming gui for the Lego Mindstorms system. It
seems like a good way to get kids interested in programming if only to bridge
them to working with actual code.

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jamesbritt
Does it run the risk of hiding too much of what actual coding entails?

Put another way: Many developers look down on Visual Basic because it made
certain things easy and other (arguably more important) things near
impossible, creating (so the argument goes) a group of coders who didn't, and
never would, understand programming in any meaningful sense.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise VB as a good way to get people
interested in "real" coding.

Does ease of use, and quick results in a limited domain, really act as a
gateway to sophisticated programming?

I suspect the trick is to make it hackable in an interesting way, so that
those with some motivation have a natural path to go learn how computational
systems work when the default interface become too limiting. (VB was always
usable enough that few people felt the need to go learn C or C++ whatever to
accomplish things, so it was easy for people to be satisfied.)

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rami
VB was my first programming language (I was 15 at the time) it is a good way
to produce results fast and learn about conditional statements, loops and
functions. Later, I switched to C and C++.

