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Comment by ordinary | Hacker News Reader

When I was 15, I had to get a TI-83 for school. There was a fairly lively program trading scene, so I got a handful from friends. The 'EDIT' menu proved too tempting for me to resist and, TI-BASIC being what it is, everything went downhill from there.

Now, I don't think I could write anything in TI-BASIC to save my life. Thank goodness.

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I think that the TI-83 is basically the perfect programming environment for novice programmers. All of the functions and language constructs are tokens accessible only through menus. They're all listed in menus, and it's very easy to wonder what the "For" statement does, for example, after you scroll past it for the hundredth time.

If you give a 12-year-old a Python repl, then they'll be paralyzed. There's just too much freedom. In years of tinkering as a child (in between booting and launching WIN) the only things I ever figured out how to do in DOS were press the enter key to make lots of C:\ prompts appear, and type things to get a "Bad command or filename" error. Compare that to the TI-83, where I was able to figure stuff out with minimal introduction.

Another aspect that shouldn't be discounted is that students can practice programming during math classes...

Yes, I think that this an important point. I learned programming with QBASIC which had a manual included. I learned a lot just by trying to figure out all these commands.

Another thing that may greatly help is auto-completion. Type some random stuff and look what the IDE thinks it is.

I always want to have programmable computer so i can do data entry during fieldwork and do data analysis instantly without reaching pc..

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