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0 pointsalanctgardner212y ago0 comments

> Programming is the critical thinking aspects of developing software and a skill that everyone should master: starting with children.

That's pretty much the opposite of my point: programmers want everyone to think like programmers (per your definition). In my opinion, this kind of "critical" thinking is not necessarily a positive: there are other ways to think critically that don't map well to programming. This seems like the typical HN view that everyone should think like I do. Some people don't get math, or symbolic logic, and that's not stopping them being a value to society.

Looking at your profile, it seems like you have a horse in this race. Personally, Visual looks very slick, but I don't think visual representations are really appropriate for programming beyond toys (or maybe data modelling, but not procedural programming). It gets very hard to lay out a large program in 2D space, and the toolbox required to enumerate all the built-ins and libraries seems like a bit of a handicap compared to just typing them.

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ericHosick12y ago

My sentence was poorly written. I wanted to say "Programming is the critical thinking aspects of developing software and critical thinking is a skill that everyone should master: starting with children."

I don't want everyone to think like programmers. I want programmers to think like everyone else and hope some day that everyone can be programmers.

> It seems like you have a horse in this race.

Ya. We do. We've been working on a new development methodology and from that a visual object language and framework. Initially we coded against the framework but have found that you can visually represent usage of the framework equally well.

> really appropriate for programming beyond toys (or maybe data modeling, but not procedural programming)

Funny you say that. I also agree if you are using traditional approaches to software development (aka procedure programming). However, our framework does not use procedural programming per-se in that it has no paramaterized procedures/methods/functions/sub-routines.

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