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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 05:27 AM

  Why are you so obsessed with BASIC?

  I too grew up learning BASIC. However, my kids never learned it, and why should they? The concepts in BASIC are four or five generations behind today's methodologies.

  Basic encourages spaghetti style coding, and the need for line numbers is a pain. It was good in the days predating page based text editors, but today line numbers are just a relic of an ancient time. Heck, forget about object orientation. True BASIC doesn’t even have have functional programming or even "top down" design! And, don’t get me started about the variable names.

  If you want to teach a kid to program today, why not use Perl? It’s fast to learn, interpretive, and can be used from quick “guess my number” scripts, to fairly serious client/server programming. I gave my kids the Llama book, and they pretty much took off on their own. Perl for the PC is freely available from ActiveState. If you have a Mac or a Linux system, it’s already on there.

  And, talking about Macs and Linux systems, bring up the ol’ command terminal and teach them a bit of shell scripting. I showed my kids how to write quick scripts to parse a file, rename all the files in a directory, automate backups, etc. Kornshell is pretty powerful, and most systems come with Desktop Kornshell which is a GUI version of Kornshell.

  Of course, what kids really like to do these days is design their own webpages. Two of my sons have learned CSS and HTML, and the middle one has picked up PHP. He’s now coding his own Joomla modules. Not bad for a 15 year old. The older one, however, is more interested in JavaScript (You know, that AJAX stuff).

  Next thing you’ll be whining about how there are no good books on UUCP networking.

  —qazwart Read qazwart's other letters
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