Comment Balance taxes? (Score 2) 299
I've never balanced taxes. Is this a new thing?
Oh, you mean balance checkbooks and pay taxes. There's much better software to do that these days.
And there are much better ways to teach programming. For a very long time there has been a movement to bring programming to the masses, as if, somehow, everyone would be able to write beautiful, intricate code to solve their most complex problems. Most people can barely match their clothing (note to the reading-impaired: that was hyperbole); why should we expect them to be able to write code?
Writing programs requires clear, linear thought. It requires thinking in terms of structures and systems. The push in the greater population has been toward valuing non-linear thought (although that baffles me), so there's a big mismatch to overcome. Yes, there are plenty of graphical programming languages that reduce the need for precise syntax, but they only REDUCE it, not eliminate it, and they still require procedural thinking which, ultimately, presents an insurmountable difficulty for many people.
Not everyone can or should be a programmer: Not everyone is a writer, Not everyone is a photographer, Not everyone is a painter. Sure, everyone should be given basic skills in writing, and perhaps in drawing or painting as a child, and so perhaps everyone should be given basic skills in programming, but beyond that, why? Not everyone is able to understand calculus; why should we automatically expect that everyone should be able to write Java, Python, or whathaveyou?