I teach a general education course for my state university system. My students are third year students.

I have to tell them in writing that plagiarism is not allowed.

I have to tell them in writing that they need to attend class.

From an actual student email: "I also want to know if coming into class is a big deal for the sake of importance in missing something big?"

Another student decided to ignore the course URL on the syllabus but remembered I use Moodle, so has spent the last THREE WEEKS wandering aimlessly around moodle.org looking for his class' website.

At least four of them had problems with a login that was their first initial followed by their last name, with their password being the same.

I have students openly either sleeping or surfing porn in class.

Good for you! My mother had the same reputation but they couldn't threaten her because she dotted her i's and crossed her t's (meaning that she documented EVERYTHING) and my district is lucky we didn't sue them. I've been there and know exactly what you are talking about. I applaud you for sticking up for your daughter.

Runtime Revolution

Yes, and one of those web co-creators did it inspired by the Hypercard ancestor of RunRev while the other is a RunRev user today. If it's good enough for them...

No, they will do none of those things, including coming to you for a job. And the nice thing about this language is that they won't be doing those things because they don't have to. Do they have fun? You bet. Do they benefit? Yes, they benefit from being able to create their own solutions. They benefit from increased confidence in using something other than PowerPoint which, when you consider that these students are not ever going to lust about creating their own operating system, is huge. In terms of inventing a new language, subsets of this language have been successfully in use since the mid-1980s. Why natural language and GUI toolbars and widgets? Because normal humans, e.g., nonprogrammers, tend to be visual learners. I once had the opportunity to hear Robert Callaiou, co-inventor of the web (and, incidentally, a Rev user!), speak on the subject and he humorously noted what nearly every study I've read on the subject of teaching programming to novive/nonprogrammers: that learning language is best which contains the fewest curseword characters, because all those funky characters and definitely not normal usage of punctuation can make beginners go cross-eyed.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~ftepfer/SchlFacilities/TireSwingTable.html

No, you're trolls because you criticize it without even looking at it and kicking its tires. Some of the people posting here in defense of the product are doing so not because they are paid to do so but rather because, unlike you, we did download it and kick its tires... and we're happy customers.

Which is precisely why the language does matter. languages that depend heavily on properly placed dots/semicolons/curlicue brackets and indenting are simply more difficult to learn. Writing proper pseudocode ends up being sacrificed for these things and, with RevTalk, the pseudocode ends up being pretty close to the real code.

If you were a novice programmer, or taught them, you would know the answer to your question.

And I'm lame for submitting this twice :-/

And the reason for this is that Pascal was designed as a teaching language.

You're on /. and you need an uninstaller? Are you kidding me?

It's funny -- do we ever hear engineers complaining that the wheel and fulcrum have already been invented and these noobs don't have to learn how to invent their own, or that they can use modern machinery?!

Do doctors complain about the invention of antibiotics or painkillers?

Do writers complain that we no longer have to rule things out on *parchment* before we write?

Geez... programmers are a grumpy, insular, jealous lot...

Okay, as the person who wrote that tutorial, I'd like to let you in on a few things. First -- I wrote it for my non-CS (third-year university student) majors who, in the course of 16 weeks, were able to use Rev to make interactive multimedia and computer games, and that, far superior to what their CS major colleagues were able to create. Second -- Try that with C++ or Java. Or even Flash. Goodluckwiththat. 16 weeks. Third -- Show me what your typical "geek" does after an introduction to programming in 16 weeks. Oh, and it needs to be cross-plat. Doublegoodluckwiththat. And they need to learn how to use audio editors, video editors, image editors... how to do animation... basic game and interactive system design, and user interface basics, all in the same 16 weeks. Right. Not happening, my friend.

Secondly, in terms of learning to program, you are clearly ignorant. Go through the ACM literature on the subject. Here -- let me help you: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm Here's a few references:

Mayer, R. (1981). The Psychology of how novices learn computer programming. ACM Computing Surveys 13(1), 121-142.

Smith, D., Cypher, A. & Schmucker, K. (1996). Making programming easier for children. ACM Interactions 3(5), 58-68.

Bonar, J. & Soloway, E. (1983). Uncovering principles of novice programming. Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 10, 10-13.

Green, T. (2001). Instructions and descriptions: some cognitive aspects of programming and similar activities. Proceedings of the working conference on advanced visual interfaces, 21-29.;

Barr, M., Holden, S., Philipps, D. & Greening, T. (1999). An exploration of novice programming errors in an object-oriented environment. SIGCSE Bulletin 31(4), 42-46.

Neal, L. (1989). A system for example-based programming. CHI'89 Proceedings, 63-68.

Guzdial, M. (1995). Centralized mindset: a student problem with object-oriented programming. SIGCSE'95, 182-185.

Ramadhan, H. (1992). An intelligent discovery programming system. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing: technological challenges of the 1990's, 149-159.

Decker, R. and Hirshfield, S. (1990), A Survey Course in Computer Science using Hypercard. Proceedings of the twenty-first ACM-SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education 22(1), pp. 229-235.

Well, one of the co-inventors of the www uses it, so, clearly, it's not just for 'dummies'.

What is it about geeks that they want to keep programming a hopelessly remote possibility for 'the rest of us'?

Ya know, 'the rest of us' actually have lives, significant others, etc. We don't all live in our parents' basement with blow-up dolls.