Editor’s letter
I’ VE REACHED THE second point in my life where I find myself traipsing across university campuses hunting out oddly named buildings. “They said it was up the hill and left,” I moan to anyone who will listen, “so where the [muffled] is it?” There! My son and I hurry through the doors, follow the signs and find ourselves in a modern lecture theatre – all bendy tables and weirdly shaped seating, as if Escher and Dalí decided to get out of art and into sadistic furniture design. We throw ourselves into two of the few empty seats and wait for the start.
By the time it does, there’s standing room only. The head of faculty enters, wearing his academic-cool mix of jeans and shirt, and begins the sell. “If you’re here,” he begins, “then you’re considering computer science as a subject. Maybe you have decided. Maybe you haven’t. But I’m about to show you why it’s such a great choice.”
And he does. Go back ten years, he explains, and this was the list of top ten companies: cue a table full of firms such as Exxon, General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell. Microsoft is the only technology representative there, tucked away in position seven, unless you count AT&T at number ten. And then flick to now. The table is packed with tech companies, with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook occupying the top five slots.
He doesn’t mention that those tables refer to market capitalisation rather than turnover, but no matter: the point is that tech is where it’s at. When I left university in the early 1990s, the “sexy” companies were in finance. If you wanted to make your fortune, that’s where you went. Skills required? Lots of confidence, a sharp brain and questionable scruples. Things look very different now, and not just because of the various financial scandals in the intervening years. If I were to retake my degree today, it would be computer science.
There’s only one problem with that: I was never good at coding. Aside from one BBC BASIC text-based adventure game, I can’t think of a successful program I created. That’s in stark contrast to my three children, who all appear to take naturally to programming, whether that’s using Scratch for my youngest or Java and Python for my eldest.
I reassure my faltering ego that their skills are down to opportunity. After all, they have had the tools to tinker with since junior school. When I were a lad computer time meant an after-school club, when we got an hour on one of the BBC Micro Model B computers in the lab.
Now, thankfully, computing is open to everyone. You only need to look at the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to realise that: £34 for a computer that could actually work as a day-to-day PC? With limitations, sure, as Darien GrahamSmith describes in his review ( see p50). But once you get into your programming environment such things don’t matter. There’s a lot to say about having few distractions, too; if I’d spent more time in BASIC and less on Chuckie
Egg, then life could have been very different. Today’s children have different distractions, with their phones, tablets and laptops all offering ways to consume video and games that my 12-year-old-self could only have dreamt of. Not every child will take to coding, just as I didn’t, but with such a low price, and such a good product, this fourth-generation Raspberry Pi could well spark a fresh generation of British coding talent. Let’s hope it does.