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• Friday, November 10, 2006 11:41 AM

  David Brin adds an afterthought about how this article changed things!

  Hi, David Brin checking in again with an afterthought about how this article had genuine results!

  Swedish programmer Nikko Strom read my Salon Magazine cover story “Why Johnny Can’t Code” and was among the few who seem to have actually “got” the point... that even having universal access to obsolete BASIC is better than having nothing at all... which is what millions of kids now have as a programming language on their so-called “computers.” Desktops and laptops that can do a million things... but which can no longer compute!.

  (How did we ever let that come to pass? And why has no one commented on it till now?)

  Many students (like my own kids) still have textbooks with “Try It In Basic” exercises... that zero percent of them are even able to try! Make that one or two percent... who have savvy professionals or super-nerds to help them download and decipher obscure interpreters. A travesty, when it would be so easy to just create a simple web site that...

  Well, to see how easy, drop by Strom’s QUITE BASIC web site -

  http://www.quitebasic.com/

  - which he created quickly, in direct response to my article.

  Wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, it is designed to ease any student through copying down a few lines of a BASIC program and not only trying it out (with a handy graphics “canvas”) but also STEP through the program, watching variables change, one line at a time! (Something I suggested in the Salon article.) Allowing the brighter students to mentally follow along, envisioning each and every incremental stage and KNOWING that it’s all about algorithms and human-made commands, not magic.

  Now if only a million high school math and physics teachers could be told; with this web site, all those BASIC demos and exercises in the older texts are no longer useless! (I’m as proud of this as I am of my recent patent... and it may do more good, it seems.)

  Interested in seeing another fine effort - somewhat differently done - toward a similar goal? BASIC-256 (http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/) is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.

  I frankly cannot tell which approach is better for the purpose at hand. The goal of re-establishing a very simple version of BASIC as a “lingua franca” that’s available to everybody, every person who has a modern computer with web access.

  Again, the aim is not to PRECLUDE other, perhaps much better alternatives, like Python or JavaScript. Frankly (and I'm tired of repeating it) I don't particularly like BASIC as a language for getting anything OTHER than simple introductory exercises done. So?

  The purpose is to restore a very simple universality that textbook publishers can rely upon - as they did for a decade - well enough to assign little illustrations in class, and know that all students can then type in a few lines (perhaps the only lines of code that some of them will ever type!) ... and thereby get a little taste of moving a pixel by the power of math ... and by math alone.

  Any person who has done that, even once, is less afraid of the wizard, standing behind the curtain. He or she has seen the algorithm and made the computer obey. That, alone, is an important lesson.

  —David Brin
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