PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi [LWN.net]

PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi

Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi by jmorris42
Parent article: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi

3. Programming is for 'nerds.'

Nerds are cool these days, hadn't you heard?

Also, to be blunt, back in the 80s before the old typing courses took over computer education in the UK, programming was a subject that got a widely-watched set of TV programmes made about it with their own enormously popular microcomputer. It was not a niche subject back then -- or, if it was, the niche was huge. Most UK free software developers got their start then -- it's one reason why the field is aging at roughly a year per year and most of us are a similar age: we all came out of that era.

The whole point of the Pi is to try to bring those days back.

(Log in to post comments)

There is a reason for 80s nostalgia.

Posted Mar 23, 2013 10:25 UTC (Sat) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I feel really grateful to have been raised in the 80s as the home computer boom was taking off. Of course back then I was also lucky my family was well connected enough that I got to play with everything from the Jupiter Ace to the ubiquitous Spectrum and eventually the Atari ST. Although out of the box the ST wasn't super programmable once I had a copy of DevPac and ST Internal (full annotated assembler listing of the BIOS!) I was away.

In the UK it has been a problem for years that we can't get enough graduates with decent programming experience. Even CS students can come through the system having learnt Java and only having a peripheral understanding of what actually goes on under the covers.

The Pi isn't perfect but it is cheap and has the momentum of the educational community behind it. Python I think is a reasonable choice for a introduction to programming and of course being based on a full Linux the possibilities are limited only by imagination. Even the relatively lightweight main CPU is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had to play with in our day.

The UK government has recently abolished the widely mocked ITC GCSE subject, rightly arguing that learning skills like using spreadsheets and word-processors should be covered as tools in other classes. It remains to be seen if we'll see a return of an actual programming based GCSE computer science like in my day but even if we don't it's heartening to see that kids are taking to the platform and letting their imagination run riot :-)

There is a reason for 80s nostalgia.

Posted Mar 26, 2013 0:44 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Of course, the whole reason for the longstanding dearth of people with decent programming experience is because of that very abolished ITC GCSE subject. I was one of the first people to take it, and it was utterly, utterly useless. Hours wasted on Excel and Word 1.0 and PageMaker, while I was writing operating systems in 6510 asm and teaching myself OO in my spare time. Of course, nobody wanted to do A level computing, not if it was as useless as the GCSE (which I understand it was).

It's a real shame that they kept the typing course on (that's what ITC is the descendant of), while ignoring the BBC TV computing programmes and all that sprang from them (a generation of UK hackers! The last generation until now, to be honest. Even now, the newly-resurgent UK computer gaming industry is mostly populated with people who grew up with the BBC B and Speccy.)