Dive in, feet first
BillG apparently raised a couple eyebrows when he told a panel of senators that the limit on H1-B visas, which allow foreign workers into America temporarily, should be removed. Of course, that's always going to cause some sort of ruckus from American-born programmers who want those jobs for themselves. What's worse to me is that it's an indictment of our country's inability to produce good computer scientists relative to the rest of the world.
That's why hearing that story made me think about how I learned about computers and programming when I was growing up. A lot of the education I received on the subject before college was self-motivated. I still remember seeing the move WarGames as a seven-year-old, and saying, "I want to work with that stuff!" I attended a computer camp that year at a local high school, where I learned how to make some basic BASIC programs on an Apple IIe. Later, my family purchased a Kaypro I, aka "The Lunchbox". It had two floppy drives, a little green screen, and that's it... old school. (Not punchcards-old, but still old.) This was the machine on which I spent hours and hours writing BASIC programs, mostly games just for my amusement. Later, when the Kaypro finally died and we replaced it with a 286 PC, I used Microsoft's GW-Basic. The games I created got more and more creative and complex; some were text-based, but some had crude ASCII block graphics. Eventually I would have to really think about how I wanted to structure things. It turned into a great mix of left-brain and right-brain exercise (just don't ask me to remember which half of the brain does what).
And that's how I learned a lot of the basics of programming. That time I spent with BASIC taught me about code design, variables, order of operations, debugging, and more. I'm probably a better tester today because I still remember some of the common mistakes I made as a junior programmer back in the day. But what do you do if you're a kid today who wants to learn how to program? There is no more BASIC... which is fine, because it's no longer practical to use it professionally. Long-time stalwarts like C and Fortran have been deprecated for sleeker, object-oriented languages... but that might be too difficult for somebody who's just starting out, if they've never before written a line of code. It's a lot harder to write a "Hello world" app in Visual Studio than it was in BASIC.
This is where I think Microsoft could do a lot of good. We've already made owning and running a computer an easier possibility for almost anyone in the world, and I think making programming more accessible and easier to learn should be one of our next priorities. Here are some examples of what we've got going already for the up-and-coming geek (and I hope we can come up with even more):
Beginner Developer Learning Center
C# for Sharp Kids
XNA Game Studio Express
Coding4Fun
Technology is a part of everyone's life these days, and it's important to get children interested in going underneath the hood of the technology they use. I love XNA, because it makes game programming easier, and that's what kept me coding as a kid. Who knows... maybe some kid out there, right now, has a brilliant idea for the next Hunt the Wumpus. We have to encourage that.
(Right? We do, don't we? Well, maybe not... those pits were annoying.)
