> Why do we not have a programming language that is designed for education and in widespread use across the world
It is important for a teacher to immediately demonstrate subject-matter mastery. If a student asks a question that goes beyond the planned lesson, you need to have an answer. You can't say, "I don't know how to do that." That would make you look incompetent.
When you're teaching programming, it is easiest to do this with a programming language that you know well and use everyday. That language is unlikely be a language designed explicitly for education.
My students would frequently ask how to accomplish something, how syntax or keywords worked on q deeper level, whether there was a stl class for a purpose, or what caused an error, etc, that I didn't know about already. I didn't hide my ignorance even a little bit, but Idid help them find an answer. In lecture settings, if it wasn't too much of a digression, I'd demonstrate finding the answer. In one on one help, or one on group help, I'd lead them through finding the answer themselves. My students had a lot of respect for me as an authority on the language and still listened to my advice and came to me with questions frequently.
This is kinda important across all fields, but especially in programming, you don't need to know the right answer by rote so much as you need to be able to seek and identify the right answer with some independence using existing resources.
(20 Questions, from the intro) Trying to think of a thing for the game is not a search over a set of known things. Just saying the possibility set has size 2^N doesn't mean that choosing something in the set consists of processing the set. But even if that were the case, and if you do consider each of 2^N options, the consideration process itself is not trivial and probably varies wildly.
(English typing) Touch typists do not (only) simply convert an existing/known string to a sequence of hand actions by mapping character to action. There are whole words and sequences that become units/tokens from the standpoint of muscle memory and processing (this will be relevant to the rubik's cube topic as well). When i type, there's a sort of planning and queueing of actions, but also there's monitoring of actions that allows fast error correction with pressing delete a number of times or holding it and costly determining when the error has been reached, and resuming afterward. Of course the process likely varies from person to person, but there's such a host of other things going on that should count as part of the information processed in this simple behavior that the example and numbers used in the paper for it are utterly useless even as estimates.
(Rubik's cube blind speed solving) Again we see reference to the entire possibility space (from the perspective of possible configurations of the puzzle). But solvers do not identify the configuration they encounter with reference to the space, nor do they search the space for it. They look for patterns and ignore what they cannot use for the strategy they have practiced. The cuber often does not commit to memory the whole configuration, but will often convert it to a custom and bespoke mnemonic. It's just utter nonsense to refer to the number of possible configurations, it has nothing directly to do with what the human is doing.
If I memorize a 30 word passage, i have not "processed the set of possible 30 word passages".