If you really want a language "designed to teach programming and problem-solving", try Scheme or Haskell. Those are truly stable languages that will help students learn sound computer science principles, basic data structures, and programming principles.

Once that's in place, learning a "real-world" programming language is straightforward. No programmer should master only a single language.

And, yeah - C wouldn't be my choice for a first programming language either.

IT is an expense. A necessary one, and if done well the cost will be under control and things won't break down too much or otherwise get in the way of whatever business we have. As with most professions, there's elements of engineering and craftsmanship, and we should rightly take pride in doing it well.

But glory? Never saw any of that.

'round here, 100 sms/day is not unusual. Certainly chatty teenagers will do that. And so what - it takes a few seconds to send one, and it's free if you have anything like a decent plan. They keep their social network alive all the time with this; different from what I did back in the late bronze age, but then I didn't do thing like my parents did either. Sound like the US is catching up with where we've been over here for some time.

I'm always surprised by how much fuss people make of changing habits and cultural patterns. It's just people using technology for what people have always used technology for - communicating.

Of course it's OK to text while working. After all, it's a darn efficient way to communicate with co-workers.

As for being on time - well, for lots of jobs what matters is that people do the job, not when. Giving people time flexibility usually pays of big time. Doesn't work for all jobs, of course, but for many jobs it is indeed "not a big deal".

I gave my daughter a cellphone when she turned 7, and she's been using it quite responsibly since she got it. At 8, I'd say about half the kids in her class have one. It's not used to a whole lot, mostly for short messages ("can I go with X after school"). There's not a huge amount of texting between the kids yet - she mostly texts with her grandma and with a couple of cousins.

Given that everyone else in her family have a cellphone and is texting, it would feel really off to me if she didn't have one.

To be sociable in a world full of social technologies, you have to master those technologies.

In this part of the world (Scandinavia), it's generally recommended that kids 10 or above shouldn't be without a cellphone, or they will be socially isolated. Texting is how kids runs their social life - it's how they spread ideas, it's how they agree to meet up after school or go play ball, it's how everything happens. If you don't have a cellphone, you're just not part of what's going on.

Also, remember that kids are good at developing a relaxed attitude to technology. Few kids will let it take over their life. Having a cellphone will not send a 7 yo texting all the time. It will just be one more way in which they communicate with the world.

It's rather amusing to see a bunch of geeks complaining about youngsters these days and how their choice of tech platform is destroying conversation and spelling and so on. This from a generation that was the first to adopt email and web discussion boards.

Happily, youngsters don't care what old farts think.