I think looking at source code is passive. Having to type it in is not. There's something... different about typing it in, learning by doing. We all spend our days copying and pasting. What was neat about the code books was that you couldn't cheat. Typing each keypress to understand how a loop worked was very helpful. The reward for all of that was that you could play the game. That's why they're not supposed to be long, or overly complex in the beginning.
Of course, everyone learns differently. I could certainly be way off base. But I bet most people who actually did those code listings would agree that there's a certain value there that's very hard to reproduce with view source and cut+paste.
I think looking at source code is passive. Having to type it in is not. There's something... different about typing it in, learning by doing.
Yes, but instead of getting kids into doing by forcing them to type, I think it's much better to just make the source accessible and encourage them to tweak.
You may not know this about Smalltalk, but not only can you browse the source code of everything quickly, you can change it and have those changes active instantly on a key press. In fact, the whole thing was specifically designed as a digital Montessori toy for kids.
I think forcing today's kids to type in source code will just be seen as unnecessary drudgery. If doing is what we want to encourage, why not just make it easy to do and provide some guidance in that direction?
I agree — I like to learn new programming languages from books precisely because I have to type in any tutorial material by hand.
Thanks for starting this — all this talk of closed systems keeping kids from playing with programming, and whether video games/programming was art or not was distressing.
Of course, everyone learns differently. I could certainly be way off base. But I bet most people who actually did those code listings would agree that there's a certain value there that's very hard to reproduce with view source and cut+paste.