Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
Can anyone with kids comment on whether or not computers are even exciting and empowering anymore?<p>When I was eight, we got a Commodore VIC-20.  It plugged into the TV and booted into BASIC.  Just running PRINT statements and simple loops was unbelievably cool.  I learned key positions (and how easily mistakes are made) by spending hours typing in bytecodes printed in magazines.  With any luck, at the en of it, a completely unforeseen game would appear.<p>Getting to play with Logo on the Apple ][e was awesome, too.  Shapes and angles and horribly flickering animations were exciting.<p>Now, it seems to me that the difference between Dive Into Python (or whatever) and Call of Duty are so immense, that even running Hello World would be a disheartening experience.  But maybe I'm just too nostalgic.<p>Incidentally, I distinctly remember from my first proper high school programming course (Pascal) that the instructor asked why we wanted to learn programming.  Every single student responded, "to make games."