EDITORIAL CORDIAL
It’s our two-decade anniversary! We weren’t quite sure what would happen when we assembled three past LXF editors and one from the present in a quaint tavern by the River Avon to celebrate this. But we did it anyway and the results were most cordial. Our little Linux magazine has an illustrious history, an enthusiastic readership and has somehow managed to survive for 20 years without management knowing what a Linux is.
So we summoned Paul Hudson (a titan of all things Swift and iOS, and creator of the legendary Brain Party), Nick Veitch and Graham Morrison (both now at Canonical), together with current helmsman Neil Mohr, to discuss Linux, magazines and of course to enjoy fine ales while the rest of Future Towers was chipping away at the content mine. Naturally, the insubordinate Jonni and long-serving Effy (there are unverified accounts of him joining sometime in late 2005) came along for the banter too.
Linux Format: Do we agree that getting kids into coding at school is A Good Thing ™ ? Nick Veitch, Paul Hudson, Graham Morrison: PH: Kids these days are amazingly good at coding at school. It’s remarkable. I volunteer at a school for year six girls. I think they had a challenge last year, part of the Oxford University Computing Challenge. I showed it to some Swifties and proper 10-15 year iOS veterans couldn’t solve it, so it was hard. And then here’s these 11-year-olds solving it on their laptops using Scratch and Python.
And it worked. Respect. I think it was a problem like Maisie has a sequence: 2,4,5,10,11,22,23. Calculate the 150th term in the sequence. You can see the sequence immediately, just double it then add one. But then when you calculate it, the numbers get big and doesn’t fit after 75 doubles. Python manages it fine because of flexible data types, but Swift just says, “Sorry I can’t handle that” and crashes. It was quite exciting seeing these kids solving things some of my peers couldn’t.
I was a little disappointed to hear that GCSE Computer Studies no longer has a practical project component – well it does, but it’s not assessed. So you
