Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook. She wants to learn to program, she says, so I said, great, let's get you a real programming environment. She was nervous about her computer and all the stuff flying by on the screen, so we talked about what her computer is -- a CPU, memory, storage -- it's all bits, nothing happening here can hurt it.
We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle.
We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there.
Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface.
Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?
>Yesterday I was setting up Crouton on my 11 year old daughter's Chromebook
Yet you decided to buy her a Chromebook, which is the most locked down laptop out there with heavy DRM with everything locked to Google's services and only Google code being allowed to run natively. Even Windows is much more open in comparison and doesn't wipe the hard disk when you try to install an alternate OS. Nor do you have to "root" it.
My son enjoys my croutonized chromebook, he gets to play minecraft on it (he has it also on his iPad, and on my PS3). But along with that the older version of Scratch, a very cool open sourced game called froogle.
I also told him that he has to type some magic incantations to get them installed: "sudo apt-get install froogle" and he kind of loves it (and then forgets it right away... or do I know)...
But really for a $179 (that's how I got it) device I don't mind. He actually "blew" it once, by pressing SPACE at the booting screen and reseting the whole device (unlocked chromebooks are like that, there is a way to disable that, but haven't done it yet). I told him that minecraft is now gone because of that, but we can install it again, though his maps are not saved. He's not doing it anymore, and surely he'll be more careful than me in the future (he opened the chromebook without asking me)
I unfortunately had to downvote your comment because this is not the conversation about DRM, Google Services, etc. I'm as passionate as anyone about fighting the walled gardens out there. But it's not germane to the current thread.
I think you're confusing Chromebooks for Android devices; running non-Google operating systems on Chromebooks is very-well-documented.
I think you're also missing the parent commenter's point: that even on ChromeOS (via Crouton), his daughter's newly-learned skills will be much more universally-applicable, since she's working directly with free development tools available universally and on virtually all modern platforms (plus Windows) instead of working with toolchains specific to only one not-really-all-that-modern platform.
It costs $250, we can walk away the moment it becomes limiting. It's a lot harder to walk away from hours spent learning to do something some particular way.
To this I would say jeez: worrying about how your eleven year old daughter might be restricting herself to particular technology platforms is really somewhat premature.
He has a really good point though, you can't just dismiss it with no counter argument.
The "windows way" involves a UI specific to one OS, the *nix way can usually be applied to any UNIX like OS, of which there are far more of than Windows.
Not only that but once you learn to program on UNIX all you have to learn is an intuitive GUI to move your skills to windows.
I'd argue it isn't. It is the kind of mindshare effect from early age that makes it incredibly hard to displace Windows throughout IT. There were three computer generations of note - the fourth is still growing up and is the smartphone one - but in general, the generations were:
1. The Unix era, back in the 70s, back when it was all university stuff. Free software was unheard of but the code was always widely distributed.
2. The Mac era, in the 80s, where there were a ton of different computers and they were all so primitive and simple you could easily hack on them yourself or with effort make your own kernels. DRM was too expensive to fathom so it was still modestly open.
3. The Windows era, starting with DOS but lasting through XP, where users grew up on a completely black box experience where you bought an emachine at Best Buy and browsed cat pictures online. No developer tools or command line presence at all after a while, so in my high school years (2005 - 2009) an extreme few of my peers even knew what programming was (I'm talking less than 5%).
The phone era is even worse than the Windows era because the form factor does not lend itself to productivity and the ecosystems are locked down (though I think a lot about Android and AOSP makes it much easier to break out of the theme park and see the wider world than in the Windows era).
I'm not saying making everyone use a command line OS or having to install Archlinux themselves would make them more enlightened, but I can convincingly say we probably lost a huge amount of potential developers in these last twenty years to the tivoization and tonka toy Windows experience where the barrier from going from software consumer to software creator was so insanely high.
On Windows, you have to first realize you can develop software. Huge barrier there. Once you know that, you are immediately in the giant cancerous mess of .net and Windows developer tools from MS, which is not something a, say, ten year old is going to be much interested in.
On Linux or any free software OS, you always have Python right on your system. You open up this terminal thing, type in python, read the website a bit, or maybe do Codecademy, and you can drop right out of the browser into the developer tool right at the ready. Maybe you want to get a bit more sophisticated and start using Gedit or Kate or Geary or Ninja as a Python IDE, in which case you just one click install this stuff to your desktop after reading about it on a Python forum.
My point is the process of "getting into" development or just giving a damn about computers is a hell of a lot more fun and reasonable on free software OSes or just one that distributes the developer tools out of the box, in the same way the 80s kids who now represent a huge chunk of the developer workforce came to be.
We then got Python up and drew a turn with Turtle, which she then extended to a rectangle.
We'll see what she learns and what I can teach her. But whatever she learns will be directly applicable to many other available environments. My Mac and her Mom's will have a terminal. At some point she can take this up to a Linode and play on the net. If her computer club uses Raspberry Pi, Linux will be there.
Maybe she could learn a lot with Windows 10 on a Pi. And much of it would be principled, and some of the basic emotional and mental disciplines needed to work with computers. But a great deal of it would be a particular interface, and one that is generally available only with costs or arrangements that exceed those of getting to a *nix interface.
Now why is it a good idea for her to invest in a sunk cost like that when she can invest in one with much greater and freer applicability?