"They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off."
That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so then they don't do anything with them but a strict subset they've decided they understand and wind up doing all sorts of things wrong or inefficiently. Often, in trying to protect the computer and themselves from what they've convinced themselves they don't understand, they wind up breaking it instead: they don't know what they're doing because they think they can't learn. "It's too complicated."
I was reading a book on a long train journey from Paris to Nice by train that I read usually once a year. My girlfriend couldn't understand why I was reading a kids book as it had an elephant on the front. I told her it wasn't, but was in fact one of the most profound books about teaching you to think in a new way.
So I let her read it and she got about half way through and she totally got it and loved it. No harder than doing a crossword or a sudoku for the first time.
I seriously need to get a copy of this book. I've been hearing about the Little Schemer ever since I first entered the Lisp world; and one of the authors of that edition even works on my favorite Lisp (Racket).
It's brilliant. By gradually building up to it, I started to really understand recursion, the power of lambdas and closures, etc. I also started to get Lisp and Scheme in the process. It's a great book, well worth it and if you're venturing out into the Lisp world, I strongly recommend it. If you're not into Scheme, I believe the book also contains equivalent Common Lisp code.
100% agreed, reading this is like being 8 and walking down a path with your hero holding your hand explaining about whatever is mystifying you. It's that pleasant.
Programs are so absurd to most people... they have to use rote learning to do anything with it (that's why changing the slightest bit will drive them mad). And most programs are full of hidden state. This is everything a programmer despise, we spend a huge amount of time ensuring our paradigms are principled and transparent, but these qualities rarely make it to the user level. So I cannot but sympathize with normal users about computer fear and wish them some better paradigm to reach acceptance (I believe ideas revived by Brett Victor are gold mines here)
Oh I don't just mean programming; I've run into perfectly intelligent people who nonetheless respond to even the most basic computing tasks as if you've asked them to insert their tenderparts into a badger's den. Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that some people just won't "get" computers, but I've also seen elderly retirees who took to it like a fish to water once you talked them out of being afraid of the thing in the first place.
Didn't mean programming either. I wanted to add my sense of the absurd burden put onto normal users with computers. These are systems full of cruft (historical, economical) that is impossible to understand really. Always moving for so-called "progress" and fed through authority (which user would ever question the way MS Office or MS Windows works ? they don't know anything else). So most of them will lose any sense of logic when dealing with these machines/OS and I can't blame them.
Some people are excited about programming in the sense that they can "make the computer do stuff". But the way I see it, I make the computer "do stuff" by just simply pressing the power-on button. And writing a "hello world" doesn't make the computer accomplish more than to write the same string in a word processor.
Maybe some people should just be reminded that programming is not fundamentally different from using a computer in general. Just that you have more fine-grained control.
Indeed, you can just type “Hello world” in a text editor!
A non-programmer, I'm sure making it a welcome checkpoint at a programming language is an incredibly stupid tradition. It should always be an one-liner that does something no app in the world can do, with clearly identified spots that a newcomer can tweak for their individual needs.
That bit really jumped out at me, because it's something I've felt about computers in general for a long time. People get it into their heads that computers are hard/complicated/etc., and so they get scared of them, and so then they don't do anything with them but a strict subset they've decided they understand and wind up doing all sorts of things wrong or inefficiently. Often, in trying to protect the computer and themselves from what they've convinced themselves they don't understand, they wind up breaking it instead: they don't know what they're doing because they think they can't learn. "It's too complicated."