Scratch: Boffins breed new programming race

The Register
By Cade Metz in San Jose
Posted in Developer, 9th March 2009

ETech Does the world need more programmers? Of course, it does, says Jay Silver. Everyone should be a programmer.
That's not to say everyone should make their living as some sort of ponytail-ed, Python-obsessed shut-in. But just as everyone should know how to write, everyone should know how to program. And that's the computing Valhalla sought by Scratch, the MIT Media Lab project Silver flaunted this morning at the Emerging Technologies Conference in the heart of Silicon Valley.
"Should everyone be a writer? No, we need people to do all kinds of things," Silver tells The Reg. "But should everyone know how to write? Or, maybe even more importantly, should everyone have a situation when they could learn how to write and express themselves? I'm going to say 'Absolutely.' And I think Scratch offers the possibility that everyone can program, that everyone can express themselves through digital media creation." (continuação)