So one of my little desires in life is to see our educational system understand the importance of teaching a new form of writing--programming--extensively and considering programming literacy to be as important as the regular kind. The introduction of Negroponte's $100 laptop at a recent UN gathering makes this all the more important. Negroponte speaks in the language of the coming revolution in an interview in Wired:
WN: Why the emphasis on open source? Why not use a donated version of Windows or OS X?
Negroponte: Because you want the kids to develop software.... It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it. So the open source and the $100 laptop are sort of flip sides of the same coin, and you want the kids to contribute to it....
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: One could argue that it's better to give them something that has more mainstream commercial appeal.
Negroponte: Now be careful there. Fifty percent of the servers on this planet are using either Linux or some kind of Unix derivative.... So 20 percent of the world's servers are already using what I would call perfectly mainstream software. And there are open-source approaches to it that are working just fine. It's not mainstream on the desktop, I'll admit, but we'll make it mainstream on the desktop. We'll push that over the edge.
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: Do you have any thoughts on what the long-term impact of giving all these kids a programming environment and an open-source ethic might be?
Negroponte: Those are two different questions. Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way -- and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things -- is one of the best ways to learn. Particularly to learn about thinking and algorithms and problem solving and so forth.
And providing the tools for some people -- it's going to be a very limited subset (who will use them) -- to develop software that will be redistributed and versioned and so forth out into the world is also important. It's part of the whole open-source movement.
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.
I hear it loud and clear.
