- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I am amazed at the number of letters agreeing with this ridiculous article. Everyone cries for BASIC, yet no one can say why a modern scripting language won't do. Or, rather, they give lots of reasons that are false.
"They're too complex for kids!" Look, kids don't have to learn all the fancy features to use them. With most modern scripting languages you could do a straight translation from BASIC and it would work. The only functional change necessary is you would use a text label for your "goto" instead of a number. Is that so hard? It would take about 10 minutes for Brin to teach his kid to translate the BASIC in his text book into a modern scripting language.
"They're so arcane!" Like BASIC isn't arcane? There was never a standard implementation of BASIC. And how about "poke 15360, 60" for arcane? What the hell does that mean?
"BASIC was closer to the metal!" No, it wasn't. BASIC is a high-level interpreted language, just like modern scripting languages. It had NOTHING to do with how the computer worked.
And, yes, you could muck around with the guts of the machines with "peek" and "poke", but on a modern machine you CANNOT DO THAT, not because no one has implemented the feature, but because there is HARDWARE in the machine that will shut your process down if you try it. This is because manipulating the machine at that level will crash your programs and corrupt your files. And today people don't want to lose all their data when Johnny decides to experiment with "poke". Whoops! There go all the digital photos! Whoops! There go the tax returns.
If your child is ready to experiment at that level, get a PIC programmer. There are any number of microcontroller products out there that can be programmed close-to-the-metal without risking all your data.
