Our crippled lingua franca

Dr. David Brin complains (first and second blog posts) that kids today can’t learn the basics of programming in a way that is fun and, above, all, trivially accessible to every computer-owner. There’s no lingua franca of modern programming – a language that is both ubiquitous (comes with every PC) and accessible (very simple and suitable to learning basic imperative programming).

A storm of comments was generated by the Salon article. Most respondents didn’t seem to understand Brin’s real points. To be fair, the article itself was rather misleading. In any event, I’m responding here to what Brin wrote in his later replies, the first of which is here, starting with the words “your letter is cogent and intelligent”. (Permalinks to individual comments on Blogger don’t seem to be working.)

Inaugurational post

I wasn’t going to start blogging. Blogging means spending time and effort and little bits of yours soul to attract random trolls who spontaneously combust[1] on your lawn come daybreak.

If you’re good enough, you can also attract people who laud your posts and help defend them from the troll hordes. And if you’re really good, you might get insightful replies that actually add something new to the discussion. Before you get there, though, you must deal with the trolls. After all, why would one write opinion pieces on a non-controversial topic? And trolling is the greatest natural attractor of Internet conversation.

But lately I’ve been spending time and effort replying to others’ blog posts. Seeing the results, I decided I might as well post my own articles. Writing a blog noone reads is still somehow better than leaving comments on the blogs of people who don’t read them. A kind of lonely grandeur.

This blog is dedicated to Eris, the new goddess rising in our skies.

[1] I’m reminded that trolls turn to stone. Back off, people; a troll wandering into a heavily defended Internet forum attracts an amazing amount of flames. Once it’s petrified, the magic field guarding it collapses and the stone turns to lava.