I clearly remember the last time I got flat. Was six, seven years ago. It so happened that my father was in the car at the time.

I pulled out the jack, popped it under the edge of the car's bodywork, and started to wind.

"No no son!" My dad's face distorted with incredulity. "What are you doing!" Gesturing with his hands. "The jack's gotta go under the front or back of the axle! You'll tear that panel off you keep going!"

No, Dad. Sorry. Your knowledge of cars is obsolete.

My Dad was doing his doctorate in a computing discipline in the late 70s, and we spent time together coding in, yes, BASIC. I'll never forget those hours we spent coding our "Pirates" game. They were the foundation of my career in IT.

But would I insist on teaching _my_ child BASIC?

You're kidding, right?

BASIC teaches nothing but bad programming habits that, if you wanted to extend your skills, would all have to be broken.

Kinda like putting the jack under the axle. Useful way back when, but please don't try that in a modern sedan.

My knowledge of BASIC, emotionally resonant though it is, is obsolete.

There are a dozen fantastic interpreted scripting languages that would not only be more useful and fun to teach, but would impart all the same lessons that I learned from BASIC, without all the negatives.

How much of your essay, Mr. Brin, is simply a refusal to upgrade your own skills before attempting to make your child ready for the world that is, rather than the world that was?

Mr. Brin writes, in attempting to illustrate why many don't "get" his article:

"Something obscure or needing downloads… can you really convince yourself that we’ll get a majority of kids to experience that?"

To which, of course, one can only respond:

Something obscure like BASIC, something needing line numbers and using non-intuitive words like PRINT to display things on a screen ... can you really convince yourself that we'll get a majority of kids to experience that?

You wouldn't teach skiing with old fashioned non-quick-release bindings.

You wouldn't teach driving with old fashioned non-sycnromesh clutches.

You wouldn't teach carpentry with old fashioned no-saftey-cutoff, no-guard bench tools.

So why, Mr. Brin, are you insisting that programming be taught with an absolute dog of an interpreted language? That's all that BASIC is. There are many other languages in that class.

Face it, you preferred loading programs from a cassette player with your son, than downloading something from the internet. Trading something he's familiar with for something you were once familiar with.

And you wonder why plenty of letter writers can't see past your nostalgia!

There are new, modern, better interpreted languages out there, where the connection to "what happens beneath" is in fact far better than it was in BASIC.

Every single lesson a beginner would learn in BASIC can be more clearly understood, more quickly surpassed, using a modern interpreted programming language.

Better yet, connections from these languages to something a modern kid might actually want to do (jazz up a webpage, program a game in Flash, etc.) are well-defined and actually work.

Something you cannot say for BASIC.

You say you want "something for everyone". A "lingua franca". Science fiction writers often overestimate the utility of a "galactic common" or simply presuppose that in the future everyone will speak Amglish.

In truth there is far more to be gained than lost by having many languages; modes of expression; and if you accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the concomitant ways of thinking.

It's the same with computer languages. The multiplicity of options for a beginner programmer these days is not a bad thing, but rather a sign of a healthy industry in its prime, and a sign that "Johnny" will be able to code rings around the likes of you and me.

If only we'll stop hamstringing the poor kid with our nostalgia for the bad old days.

One sometimes hears the phrase "If just one person thinks again, it will have all been worth it" to justify protests like this.

And so, for this effort, it's worth asking "Thinks again about what?"

The "media artist" doesn't say.

At the normal rate and frequency and length of comments posted in such games, it's hard to see how that critical "one person" would even notice a long line of text at the top of the screen, visible for a fraction of a second, let alone connect that text with any clear thought.

Gamers are far more likely to be thinking about avoiding getting shot -- it is a war game, after all.

As for someone running about offering themselves up to be killed, well, despite the emotive description of that in the article, the clearest coherent thought a gamer would have about that would probably be "What an idiot!" which clearly limits the "connection" with the text posted after the event.

As is often the case, this cannot be anything other than a protest for the benefit of the protester. The critical "one person thinking again" simply doesn't exist in this case.

And so I really do hope it makes him feel better, and wish him well. I take it he's not interested in effectively protesting the war in Iraq and so his real motives are, frankly, obscure and of little interest.