[Gllug] Logo as a first language

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Mon Mar 7 16:41:42 UTC 2005


On Fri, 04 Mar 2005, Holger Duerer said:
> It all sounds to me like just another facet of the current trend to
> put our children as early as possible into the rat race that we call
> life.  Competitiveness, competitiveness, competitiveness.  Give them
> computers as early as possible otherwise they might fall behind...

There's substantial evidence from psychology, paediatry and neurology
that introducing people to some things (particularly languages) as
young as possible is beneficial. Humans eeem to be optimized for
learning languages between the ages of about one and five.

I'm fairly convinced that if I hadn't been given access to computers
early (the age of four, in my case), I'd be *much* worse at them than I
am now. I've rarely encountered anyone who first met computers
post-adolescence who I'd describe as good (although there are of course
certain genius exceptions: e.g. Don Knuth). What they particularly seem
to lose is the intuitive understanding of code flow and the interactions
between control flow and state changes; this alone makes it almost
impossible for the poor sods to write maintainable code.

If you're just a user, not a developer, it's probably not so important.


(In my case I'm especially lucky; if it hadn't been for that early
chance encounter with computers I'd probably be either unemployable or
institutionalized now, as this seems to be the fate of people with
severe Asperger's who don't happen to focus on something useful...)

-- 
> ...Hires Root Beer...
What we need these days is a stable, fast, anti-aliased root beer
with dynamic shading. Not that you can let just anybody have root.
 --- John M. Ford
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