** here's the additional point, mentioned above.
I was speaking to a visiting IT lecturer last week. Started off as quite an informal discussion, but then really got into the crux of why we might not see many new users.
If we look at how we came to know the language we know (and love?) - did we learn about it through schools, or did we find out about it purely by pottering around by ourselves?
I know for me it was a bit of a mixture. Our science teacher in high school had Hypercard on an iicx, and this was really my first in-road into hypertalk. It wasn't really mentioned at school, even back then - and this IT lecturer hit the nail on the head as to why.
Back then, if you were a teacher - you could go 'off-script' a lot more. You could really tailor the lesson to your own teaching style, and to an extent, you could kind of cover what you wanted - because it wasn't as regimented. As long as you were teaching the fundamental approaches (variables, functions, handlers, loops and the like), it didn't really matter what language you were doing it in.
(This is where I might upset Richmond
)
I'm sure you have a lot more freedom Richmond in how you teach, and what you teach in your lessons.
Increasingly 'over here', teachers are being very much dictated to as to what they MUST teach in. It HAS to be Python, or is MUST be Rust. It cannot be something that is not on the curriculum. This is what this IT lecturer was mentioning: however good we make OXT (and he was hugely impressed with it btw), the likelyhood of it ever being used in an education setting is likely zero - because it's not something that any teacher will be expected to teach (or part of their performance metrics) (where's the yawn emoji?) - but this is sadly what teaching is becoming. A scripted approach, dictated down from above. The 'good-old-days' of teachers actually being able to do their own thing is certainly a rarity. (I remember for CDT classes, we actually rebuilt most of the CDT teacher's hillman imp on the playing field.) This undoubtably taught us more about engineering than any 'ergonomic study covering the fundamental design principals of office and home furniture' - and I can still clean and reassemble a carburettor to this day. He drove it off the field, fully working at the end of year 11. (Made us all smile to think we had a hand in getting it working, but the crafty so-and-so got free car repair with the use of all the metalwork machines in the CDT department).
To use a direct analogy: It's why English teachers might want students to read H.G Wells, George Orwell or John Green, but have to stick to Shakespeare or Emily Bronte. They might wish they could go 'off script', but ultimately because they know the students won't be tested on this other material - teaching them that is a waste of time and there's only so many hours in the day. Why spend ages recommending something when the student might fail on what the examiner expects them to know? This then comes back to the teacher if a certain threshold of non-passing students are reached, and the teacher's teaching methodology comes into question - and a 'performance review' kicks in. (Which is sad, but very unfortunately true).
If 'scripted teaching' is indeed the case, what I'm getting at - where do we think our 'new users' would be coming from? Is YouTube likely to be our only way of gaining extra audience? - would this mean that we are relying on only one source for our prospective new audience. (All our eggs in one basket?) - Or, do the young'uns expect EVERYTHING to be on tablets and phones these days (if that's the case, are we barking up the wrong tree and should be focusing our efforts in updating the mobile device app-building capabilities?)
*this can probably go in the 'education section'
