Felienne Hermans: The Programmer’s Brain and Hedy

Felienne Hermans isfull professor of Computer Science Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.Felienne is the author of the 2021bookThe Programmer's Brain, a very readable and highlyinsightful introduction to the cognitive science behind how human brains learn programming. Why is programming hard to learn, and what can we do about that, both as learners and teachers?Werecommended thisfor everyone, but it isparticularly useful for those who just started to learn programming, as well as people whotry to teach others.Felienne’s most recent project is Hedy, a programming language aimed at beginners – including children – and that realises many of the insights from The programmer’s brainabout whyprogramming ishard to learn.Hedy is a “real” programming language in that it isunapologetically text-based, but the language design is gradual,progressingfrom an extremely lenient but incomplete language to a nontrivial subset of Python.The language is under active development and constantly exposed to feedback from children who actually learn programming. We find this brilliant andare particularly impressed by the possibility ofHedyto teach someprogramming to everyone, rather than all programming to some people.