[SLL] Great day for linux OLPC

[Creede Lambard]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 01:17:24PM -0800, Glenn Stone wrote:
> Actually, what got drilled into us when we learned calculus was, we were
> required to do the integration the "hard way" for the first week or two,
> showing our work using limit theory, etc... and after that and forevermore
> thereafter we were encouraged to do it the easy way.  
> 
> The point of spending that brief time doing it the hard way was to drill
> into our brains the *theory* behind how you get from (massively complex
> thingy here) to (the final answer).  
> 
> That was high school; ironically, when we got to college, we learned the
> basics of programming first, and it was only as a junior, already committed
> to the track, that we got our very first theory class.  What they did teach
> us first before we really got our heads around sorts and queues and stacks
> was the *psychology* of the whole thing... which is something I still use
> today.  (The theory bits only get used in very high level, large scale
> architecture kinds of things.)
> 

My first formal programming class was Fortran back in 1973. They started us
off during the first two weeks doing assembly programming on a PDP-8 before
we got to write any Fortran (which I already had a little experience in
thanks to a computer-literate roommate). I never did really catch up and got
a D+ in the class. I occasionally cite this as my only formal training for
my chosen profession. (Not stricly true, but it makes a good story.)

> ObLinux: Ironically, Linux was invented precisely because Linus didn't have
> anything he could really *use* at home to do his programming labs... I'm
> going to assume it would be relatively easy to add compilers and such to an
> OLPC box if they aren't already there, so once the kids got beyond simple
> tool use and started thinking, "Now, how does that work?"  they could
> explore with the tool they already had...  

I'd make a Python installation you could run from a USB drive or a server
somewhere. (I miss the days when computers had Basic interpreters built in
and magazines like Compute! would have game listings that you could type in
and tinker with. They, not my woeful Fortran background, were my real
computer education.)


-- 
 * .~. `(  ------------------------------------------------------------
` / V \  . Creede Lambard                : When Linux is outlawed,
 /(   )\   creede at penguinsinthenight.com : only outlaws will run Linux.
  ^^-^^    ------------------------------------------------------------