Teach kids to farm, not code.

Programming begins with understanding of how computers work, what is an architecture, an instruction set, size of registers, etc. Look at that MIT Scheme source. They have macroses - 32bit word - well, use few bits as a tag, and rest as a value. 64 bit word - this for a tag part, this for value. This is an example of programming.

When people "program" VMs - it is just coding. Piling up stuff without understanding. VMs were marketed for those who don't want to understand or even think. Ask those "programmers" to describe the behavior of the system in which their code supposed to work - I dunno, lol, JVM is the best VM, you know.

Programming is about understanding how your data are represented, what are the access patterns, when memory is allocated, are there any mutations? concurrent access? how conflicts were resolved, if any, etc. It is about realizing that there is an OS, which manages your memory, switches contexts, does I/O, manages your stupid threads, and has another thousand processes running at the same time, sharing the same resources. Then, perhaps, programmer will think more about the data and access patterns, which is the essence of programming.

It almost doesn't matter which language to use. Good programming has been done in C (nginx, Plan9, lisp kernels) and Lisp (Open Genera - the whole OS) etc. You can program using ideas form FP in assembly or C - there is no problem with that.

The questions coders never asking is like why on earch a web-site must be represented as a huge hierarchy of objects inside a stupid VM, while it is bunch of files and some templating? Why to do simple map/reduce jobs we need hundreds megabytes of jars and gigabytes of memory, while the same task could be implemented more efficiently even in shell scripts?

The answers, unfortunately, has nothing to do with programming. It is about making money by coders and managers.

We "know" this how, exactly? Malthus was saying the same thing in 1798. Paul Ehrlich was saying the same thing in 1968.

They were both dead wrong.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

"Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles...the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979...the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics."

You could say the same about oil rig workers or coal miners and they are going to use both coal and oil when they grow up. Should we teach kids how to do these professions too? Where should we stop? There's many "grim" professions, things that need to be done in life, yet school kids are usually shown none of them. So what?

That makes no sense. I've taken literature, I've read hundreds of books on my own. Most of them are full of illogical things. At best they are OK to teach morals, not logic.

Philosophy is closer.

Computer programming is pretty much pure logic and problem solving.

The only better way to teach logic is to teach logic.

> teaching agriculture or other physical goods producing craftsmanship to kids would make them better at real world challenges

Computers and code are real world, and they solve real world challenges.

I'm currently an A Level student in the UK that's been hacking on software and hardware projects for the last 6-7 years. I decided to go to the June RHoK event in Southampton and worked on a new project called WaterMe with 4 others that takes open satellite imagery from NASA and outputs an index of water content and foliage and more in the area over time from a user friendly interface. Also making available the data for researchers and hackers for other awesome projects.

After the Hackathon we were accepted into a humanitarian incubator called GWOB (Geeks Without Bounds) which has put our team in contact with many spectacular personalities and guidance which has intorduced me into areas of mapping, open data, funding, advertising, additional technologies and even quad-copters/balloons/flying-machines.

We are still developing the product (now closed source) and are hoping to look for investment in the near future to run the product at scale to provide for farmers, researchers and anyone interested in things such as drought and glaciers amongst others.

Needless to say this has one of the best experiences of my life so far and is way more rewarding than any freelance work I've done as just make money jobs.