Half a billion open source programmers
From School Technology Leadership Blog: “A laptop for every child on Earth.”
A ‘sound byte’ from Wired News interview with Nicholas Negroponte (chair of the One Laptop Per Child initiative):
WN: So you’re shipping this with development tools installed?
Negroponte: Yes. Absolutely.
WN: We’re talking about C compilers and Make and the whole programming environment?
Negroponte: Yup.
WN: Is the goal literally to make computers available to every child that wants one in the world?
Negroponte: It’s every child in the world whether they want one or not. They may not know they want one.
WN: You’re going to be unleashing a whole new generation of open-source programmers, who otherwise would never, possibly, have gotten their hands on a computer.
Negroponte: I hope so. I hope we unleash half a billion of them.
Ummm…. Wow. Talk about Power to the People! Brace yourself folks, the world seems to be spinning awfully fast right now.
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So you know that a Windows XP system with the .NET Foundation update (a free download and installed on tens of millions of computers already) includes compilers for Visual Basic .NET, C/C++, C# and J# right? So the ability to write programs for Windows is already out there. Visual Basic .NET is a lot easier for new programmers to learn on their own than C in my opinion. Also the Visual Studio Express editions are very powerful, easy to use IDEs and, yes, free.
Alfred Thompson
1/24/2006