- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I agree with various letters that BASIC is a terrible language to learn programming from, and no one should be encouraged to do so. But trying out a 5-line math algorithm isn't really "programming," and command-line interpreted BASIC allows a student to get an initial exposure to algorithms with essentially no training. I'm sure some will say that this will poison the student's mind. Actually math algorithms in books are rarely "structured" like a modern computer language but are full of "if a < b, then go to step 7." Look at the classic in the field, Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, for example. BASIC often can let the student see clearly the relationship between the book's algorithm and the code, which might be obscured with a structured, object-oriented language.
There are simple BASIC interpreters written in JavaScript which you can run in your browser, for simple "Try this in BASIC" problems in textbooks. I don't endorse any specific one, but the first Google hit was http://www.eder.us/projects/jbasic/ and there are probably others. No downloads, no installation - just go to the site and start typing!
