Bret Victor just published his latest essay, “Learnable Programming.”
In “Learnable Programming” Bret criticizes the Khan Academy’s latest “interactive” programming education tools and suggests a better way to teach programming.
He footnotes the essay with this summary:
This essay was an immune response, triggered by hearing too many times that Inventing on Principle was “about live coding”, and seeing too many attempts to “teach programming” by adorning a JavaScript editor with badges and mascots.
“Inventing on Principle” was the talk he gave at CUSEC 2012.
If you haven’t seen/read both you must immediately:
- Get a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever comfort beverage you prefer.
- Find a comfortable place to sit and pay attention for about two hours.
- Watch the video of Inventing on Principle.
- Read the Learnable Programming essay.
It’s fantastically worth your time.
Bret sidenotes* the essay with this exciting teaser:
Forward reference: Some work that I’ve done in automatic visualization of ad-hoc data structures will be published later this year, in collaboration with Viewpoints Research.
I’m looking forward to that!
* I just invented the verb “sidenote,” as in, “He sidenoted the heck out of that teaser in the side note.”