For decades people have been learning to program by copying and modifying other people’s code.
How did you first learn to program? For us, it was by copying and tweaking simple BASIC programs on ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s.
Folk Computing (a term coined by an MIT project which encouraged children to learn programming in exactly this way) has been a common factor in programming environments from LambdaMOO to Yahoo Pipes, the OLPC, Second Life, and more.
We look at the history of folk programming from the 80s to today, and then examine some modern folk programming platforms.
Some topics we’ll explore include:
20th–24th July 2009