Ouch! Indeed that is the truth. I am currently in a dialogue with
members of the teaching community here in Plovdiv, Bulgaria who have
to teach
teenagers PASCAL (at non-Mathematical High Schools) and C++ (at
specialist Mathematical High Schools) effectively turning off vast
numbers
of children who might, under different circumstances, become brilliant
and innovative programmers.
They (the teachers) are, in turn, "kicking" against the Ministry of
Education who are, it seems, stuck in about 1985.
Well, you can point the teaching community towards the success that
LiveCode has had in getting used to teach programming in Scottish
high-schools :)
Most people who use LiveCode are like most kids who use LEGO: they
don't want to build a robot that makes coffee, trims your nails and
gives you a massage; all they want to do is build a sports car or a
model of the Millennium Falcon. And until end-users can build the
equivalent
of sports cars there is not much point in talking-up the ability to
construct the robot.
A comparison with LEGO only stretches so far, but that is the point of
what we are doing. We are trying to make LiveCode a lot more like LEGO -
you have pre-made components that can (arbitrarily) recomposed into the
application you want.
LEGO have developed a highly efficient set of processes and
infrastructure so they can deliver the sets and components they now do.
We are doing the same.
However, the comparison with LEGO stops here as a lego brick, at the end
of the day, is just a bit of plastic - it is a 'black-box' in a sense
but there is no internal structure there (beyond the physical structure
of the plastic needed to stop it from being flimsy!). i.e. Once you have
the machine and processes that can generate the lego bricks you require
in vast quantity and efficiently you are there (assuming you have a
sufficiently good design and product development process so that you
capture the current consumer imaginations at least).
The point I was trying to make was not to overstate / big up the
'ability to construct the Robot', but more to suggest that the faster we
can build the robot and the more people who have 'the ability to adapt
the Robot' the better off everyone will be and that everyone can build
bigger and better robots in the future.
I'd point out that there is little point in producing X at point Y if at
point Y, X is no longer sufficient. That means you have to be highly
aware of the process that is needed to create X, if it is too difficult
to adapt at the point it is actually finished and usable, its existence
when it appears is not particularly useful.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
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