Sure, just like give anyone access to a library and they are much more likely to read magazines and romance novels than 19th century French literature.

That's missing the point though. The point is access and opportunity. Even if only 5% become programmers, it's a net win overall (and that's not even counting the people who might play Candy Crush but still use the computer to better themselves in other ways - learning, filing taxes, etc.).

There's nothing wrong with his response given how the original post was worded...

Sure I agree, but remember, parent was wondering "if inmates have access to computers, would they become good programmers?"

A conversation based on competing generalizations is pretty thin gruel.

>they are much more likely to read magazines and romance novels than 19th century French literature.

Unless you count Madame Bovary.

What if they have an computer with no games and no internet.

As to your response... Should inmates be deprived of all distractions, especially trivial ones? How often do you BuzzFeed or candy crush or Facebook?

I would assume they would being writing. That would likely be the first step most would take. After that their abilities in mathematics, or just a general interest in problem solving would take them pretty far (barring games and internet)

> How often do you BuzzFeed or candy crush or Facebook?

I'm definitely an outlier here, sample size one. :-)

So all day cc or never

Or you could just give them a Commodore 64 or Unix box with some good CS books and no internet access. (Or a Raspberry Pi, to be more realistic.)

Give a man a computer, feed his mind for a day. teach a man to computer ...

"Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime." - David Leinweber

It's a good kind of frustration, though. It reminds me of Terence Parr's motto:

> “Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?”

Link: http://parrt.cs.usfca.edu/

More like give a man a computer and he'll start looking at porn.

What if s/he had to write a perl script to download it though?

Well funny story because that's how I learned perl ...

The old man likes to jerk us around sometimes ;) Be good koolba, hope you're happy as Larry.

without internet or games maybe. could be a linux install with no desktop, and a book about python.

... and a device that lets them play a handful of games like tetris, but only 1 minute/hour. They'll get to work re-implementing their favorites (without the time limit) on the computer before long.

They'll learn how to install Xorg and import a WebKit library so they can browse Facebook.