Comments from a teacher about teaching programming

...

"We should not be concerned with the sophistication of the output - which is what I think the heavy IDE aided approach seems too often to focus upon. Teaching children or anyone else that is what is important at the initial stages is the output, rather than the process, is misleading them."

"And children - in particular - are intuitive enough to know when they are being mislead. If we can't find a way to introduce children to programming without misleading them - and I seem to be open to that possibility that this is true more than many others - perhaps we should simply wait until they are developed, cognitively, to the point where we can."

Why start a process in a way that is not sustainable.

What does the environment teach us really about the most important aspect of becoming a programmer in any meaningful sense - i.e., working independently of large sets of mysterious dependencies. Most IDEs for beginning programmers are not only neutral, but I think counter product on this point - introducing programming as another form of dependency, rather than as the kind of liberating activity it should be understood, from the beginning, to be. And I think it needs to be sustained.