spetharrific:

computer jokes are great, but i must disagree here.

if you give someone a program, you solve one of their frustrations, but they think you made it by magic of some sort, and so they can only use it as a black box for what it was designed for. if you teach them how to program, and perhaps debug, well, then you have taught them how to build their own tools to solve many of their frustrations.

with regard to teaching someone how to program: if you teach them a language, they learn how to speak/write it. if you teach them about languages, they understand linguistic tradeoffs and underlying conceptual functionality. then they can learn many languages on their own.

most of all though, relevant to many aspects of life beyond just programming: if you teach someone how to think algorithmically, you give them the ability to break a problem down into constituent parts and understand how to solve it.

I wish we had been taught about languages before throwing us into a language. Retrospectively, it isn’t a perfect language, and definitely not optimized for memory and such. But it is elegant in its design to make it user-friendly to a programmer, rather than assuming “PROGRAMMER KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING.” As C/Assembly does. @_@

But I still miss OOP. Oh well.