Thread: Alice Programming Language..

Drag-and-drop programming? We're nowhere close to having that in any useful capacity. These students will learn something that's worthless and they'll end up being completely lost on the job.

Do you think there is a (perhaps longer term) future to it - or is it a waste of time pipe dream?

>Do you think there is a (perhaps longer term) future to it
Probably. We're moving more and more into the realm of generated code through drag-and-drop, but we're not quite to the point where it's anything but a huge headache.

They tried this 50 years ago with COBOL.

They had 3D characters on computers 50 years ago?

Originally Posted by Perspective

If it helps get more people interested in computer science then it's a good idea in my books. Sure they'll eventually have to learn real programming, but it's more like the marijuana that can lead to the pure cocain that is C/C++


Enrollment is down, and decreasing. Not just the number of courses dropped, or the number of students dropping out of CS. While this means that my salary can only go higher, it's very disturbing for the field in general. We need computer scientists.

I really don't see what the problem with losing CS grads is.

Basically, the qualified people we're losing fall into two roles: Programmers and Researchers.

Programmers are basically just producing commodities, and doing so redundantly. Civilization is not becoming more advanced because there exist twenty different programs for burning DVDs. I understand it's good for business to have more qualified workers, but that's just money, not knowledge.

Researchers, the real contributors to the field, need to start getting out of Computer Science. The world's great minds in math and science are all getting sucked in to study the same thing at the same time, because that's where the money is, not because that's where the time is best spent. CS is just a very very small subset of Pure Mathematics. This little micro-field is sucking in all the brains out of other fields of study.

They had 3D characters on computers 50 years ago?

Who says you can't attach your credit card to your computer?

Then again, maybe they didn't have holograms on them then.