Not only that. the RPi will also promot bloatware and mindless library reuse.
Teach programming fits on a simple 8 bit machine with limited resources like 8 k rom en 128 bytes ram and give students something to chew on...
We already have truckload of 'library using' codemonkeys. what we don't have enough off are people that can actually code something without an operating system and massive prechewed libraries , or without wasting 5000 calls to a library to configure some i/o pins ...
programming is not about a language.. it is about mechanism and learning to use the cpu and its hardware effectively to perform work.
People wrote whole bookkeeping and payroll programs in a PET with 20k ram and a casette ... They landed on the moon with 14K of code ... and that thing was multitasking , flying the lander ,doing radar ranging and tons of other things. all at the same time... with a clock in the kilohertz range ... Now we have cellphones with quadcore 2 GHz and six core graphics accelerators .. to play 'angry birds'.... i foresee a VERY grim future ... Forget global warming ...the global dumbing down is coming... go wathc the movie 'idiocracy'.. we're not far off ...
Now even the bootloader won't fit in that anymore .. and turning on a LCD or plasma tv and staring at the manufacturer splashscreen for 10 seconds is perfectly acceptable ... because it has to 'boot'. And don't get me started on blu-ray and dvd players. The people who write that code these days should be publicly forced to eat that tv....
I have an old daewoo dvd player. Power-on to first image is under a second. pop in a dvd disc , it spins up and 2 seconds later i have the dvd menu. it has a braindead mips processor running at 27MHz for the video processing and decoding and a 8051 to do remote control ,display and operate the drive mechanism. Works beautifully.
Compare this to my latest blu ray player. Power on to first splash screen is also 2 seconds and then there is the scroll bar with 'initializing... that takes 30 seconds because it wants to go all wonky and see if it can get an update from the internet ( i have no cable plugged in... why do you keep waiting you piece of shit. can't you do a simple 'cable detect' that would take 1 microsecond. ) and it needs to boot some open-sores / broken-source operating system.
Then you put in a disc and you stare at a black screen for another 20 seconds while the drive is grinding away trying to load the java code to run on the virtual machine. What is wrong with the processor that is in the box ? why do you need to run a virtual machine on top of it ? you blithering codemonkeys! Just write code for the real processor you flaming-turd-code-shitters. Sony should rename themselves to ShitCo.
And then it goes through some handshaking on the crypto and if you are really lucky you may get the menu ( if it hasn't crashed by now ) , if you are a bit less lucky it comes with a message that it needs internet connection to check for an update. Here you have a carrier medium that can hold 50 gigabytes of data , and you tell me there is no room for a bit of code ?
and then you finally have gone through all the hoops , select 'main feature' and press play and it first goes off for another 10 second 'grinding session' ... aaaaargh !
If i want to enjoy a movie that i bought i have to sit there jumping through updates , endless waiting , and all sorts of misery before i can see something ( and then i haven't even started ranting an raving about all the 'coming soon drab' they inject on the disc... don't you understand that , if i watch this disc 1 year later that stuff is old and i don't want to see the 'coming ssoon crap anymore ? put it on the disc if you must but do not start playing that shit by default ! Friggin shit-for-brains movie studio's )
And this is acceptable practice these days ? Anyone that writes and release such code should be banished for eternity and locked in a room full of eproms, each loaded with a single byte of their code... Eproms that are in ceramic dil packages so they always land on the floor with their pins turned upward ... and they go in barefoot ..
if you know what i mean ... ( if you have ever stepped barefoot on an upturned dil package , you do know what i mean... multiply that one package by a few million , one chip per byte of crap code... my guess is about 16 megabytes of code in a blueray ... eternity isn't long enough for those nitwits.