I think it would be interesting if we could come up with an addictive way/game to teach programming to teenagers without them realizing it.
I believe making the jump from research project to something people can actually use is the problem. James Gosling's Jackpot project had a lot of promise? It sounded fascinating five years ago that the father of Java was turning his focus and attention to making programming better.
"Bill Venners: What's the state of Jackpot, your current research project?
James Gosling: Jackpot has been really cool lately. It's what I'm spending most of my time on, and it's been a lot of fun. I was really hoping to have something I could hand out at JavaOne this year, but I've been finding too many entertaining things to do.
It's a very different world when a program is an algebraic structure rather than a bag of characters, when you can actually do algebra on programs rather than just swizzling characters around. A lot of things become possible. "
I believe making the jump from research project to something people can actually use is the problem. James Gosling's Jackpot project had a lot of promise? It sounded fascinating five years ago that the father of Java was turning his focus and attention to making programming better.
http://research.sun.com/features/jackpot/ http://www.artima.com/intv/jackpot.html
"Bill Venners: What's the state of Jackpot, your current research project?
James Gosling: Jackpot has been really cool lately. It's what I'm spending most of my time on, and it's been a lot of fun. I was really hoping to have something I could hand out at JavaOne this year, but I've been finding too many entertaining things to do.
It's a very different world when a program is an algebraic structure rather than a bag of characters, when you can actually do algebra on programs rather than just swizzling characters around. A lot of things become possible. "