18 September 2006

Dear Mr. Brin and readers,

I sympathize tremendously with your article about bringing back

BASIC for young people to use on modern machines. I am sure it will

be straightforward as you suggest for Microsoft, Apple, and the

others to provide us with BASIC language facilities on our machines

and that it would be a huge benefit for many of our young people.

Absent that alternative for the short term, I do offer some solutions.

Specifically, I have written a book (with co-author Dietolf

Ramm) called "Great Ideas in

Computer Science" (The MIT Press) which shows beginners how to get started in

computing. It features an introduction to Java with just a few

constructs and young coders can learn them and use them. I felt

that making programs callable from the web would quadruply add

to the fun and so everything is coded in applets. When you run

a program, you enter via the web and the applet interpreter comes

up on the screen. You have buttons which activate your program

features and you can do computations or draw pictures. My assistants

decided to streamline some features and wrote code to implement

some easy input-output capabilities. That code is down loadable from my website at www.cs.duke.edu/~awb.

I have a grandchild coming along and when she hits maybe age 6 or 7,

I will show her the features in our chapter 5 on graphics. It is

pretty easy to write code to put a rectangle or circle or line or

text string on the screen in any color you can imagine. The item you want will come up at the given coordinates and at a push of

the right button (which you have labelled properly). So she will be

able to draw pictures on the screen in early grammar school. From

there, I will show her looping and conditional facilities so she

can draw many squares or circles. And subroutines are easy after that.

Then it should be straightforward to introduce numbers and numerical

computation. We have taught the foundations of computer science to

thousands of college students and I feel that a modification of our

approach will work for younger people.

In your letter, you talk also about the other levels of knowledge

that go with computing: machine architecture, assembly language,

operating systems, networking, and so forth. These are covered in

the later chapters of our book. We end with several chapters on

the limitations of computing: execution time of programs, noncomputability, and programability. So my sympathies with your

points are strong and I have worked very hard to address the

problems.

I will close with an antecdote about my son who turned 14

in the early 1990s and I had a path for him to

follow. He had a passion for computer games and his unfeeling dad

would give him few opportunities to play them. We had been, for

years, walking past the darkened room at the shopping center where colored lights were flashing and bells were ringing with

my son leaning longingly in that direction. I had little sympathy.

But at some point, he asked for his own computer and I decided to

buy him a book on how to assemble your own 486. Then I took him

to the local computer store and agreed to buy any parts that he

needed. The computer store folks were glad to help out and he spent

a few Saturday mornings there screwing the thing together, plugging

in boards, and bringing up the Microsoft operating system. Then

he obtained some cool computer games and he played them until the

keyboard was nearly worn out. In his high school, he had some introduction to programming and he was on his way. Ever after and

wherever he has gone he has been the local guru who can fix your

machine if it does not work and get whatever computation done that

needs it.

So there are many routes to computer competency and I

suggest two here. But I also agree that we should bring back BASIC!!!

Thank you for your thoughtful article,

Alan Biermann

Professor Emeritus

Department of Computer Science

Duke University