Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 33 Editor's Choice: 3
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Geeks in the salon
[Read the article: Why Johnny can't code]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some excellent responses here. I question the notion that BASIC is somehow going to teach a kid how the computer really works. Help me out here, but has anyone other than a Bleeding edge Basicist ever used the language to dick around with the stack?
All of my memories of BASIC are that it was an easier way to get high level chores done than assembler and that it was an ugly way to do it. GOTOS, and horrid line numbers before you could label. I spent a lot of time back in the day figuring out how to get crap out of BASIC and into something that people could use. It was during that struggle that I figured out a couple of things: if I could avoid using BASIC, I would do so. If I could avoid using FORTRAN, another nasty, antiquated, language, I would do so. Had I ever learned COBOL, that would have been the third thing I would have figured out how to avoid.
To my way of thinking, the reason the earnest author of this article, David Brin, wants BASIC, is that it is something he knows. He is enthusiastic about it, because it was fun for him in his youth; something he can easily share with his son, Ben. When I read the article, the first thing I thought was, "well, why not just go get a shareware BASIC interpreter and run it in a shell on a PC, Mac, or Linux box?"
Several people have suggested just that.
What I want to know is, what is the magical allure of BASIC outside of the constraints of familiarity? Old style BASIC running in a shell is pretty boring, and it will not shed one bit of light on the abstractive moat around the machine one encounters using modern languages and coding practices. Nor does it share much light inside the moat, for that matter.
I am not going to engage in arguments with the computer scientists and other rabble hanging around Salon.com about this, but this article reminded me of someone lamenting that there were no more Conestogas available for Grandpa to teach the young'uns how to cross the Missouri with an oxe's ass in their face while a perfect bridge runs from bank to bank.
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Comics aren't always funny
[Read the article: WayLay]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Carol's got a taste for a little something we call irony.
Irony is appreciable as the square of the ability to recognize it.
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Scheme is a fine recommendation!
[Read the article: Why Johnny can't code]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mitch, if you are puzzled why Brin is hunting down 1982 BASIC like he was coming to get his love, consider this first google of the Scheme language I pulled up:
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Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.
Scheme was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first class procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically typed language. Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operand position. By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments. Scheme was the first widely used programming language to embrace first class escape procedures, from which all previously known sequential control structures can be synthesized. More recently, building upon the design of generic arithmetic in Common Lisp, Scheme introduced the concept of exact and inexact numbers. Scheme is also the first programming language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a block-structured language to be extended reliably.
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This is what is written on the doorstep of Scheme, at MIT.
The writing above is unintelligible, Mitch. Leaving shit like this on the doorstep is tantamount to driving away acolytles with two by fours with nails in the ends. No wonder Brin is buying Commodores for his kid.