Space Gopher posted:

The problem is, after you give kids this "$25 computer to practice basic programming on," they still need another computer to run dev tools, not to mention a monitor or TV for the Raspberry Pi itself. Meanwhile, that same computer (minus the $25 board) can run all kinds of excellent, free dev tools on a much more capable system. Sure, there's a lot of value in an inexpensive embedded system specifically as a tool for teaching embedded programming, but it's just silly to try to claim that a little dev board will somehow make it cheaper or easier to teach basic Hello World programming concepts. Just because you learned to program on a C64 doesn't mean that slavishly emulating the concept is the best way to teach programming.