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Read other letters about this article
It is obvious that writers like rshannon don't "get it" or know much about BASIC.
"Something obscure like BASIC, something needing line numbers and using non-intuitive words like PRINT to display things on a screen"
There are modern object oriented versions of BASIC like REALbasic that share the easy to understand syntax that made BASIC a universal language.
The content of most letters on this article indicate we are descending to a modern Tower of Babel because there is no agreement or acceptance of a common language to teach our kids. The response from the education community to remove code snippets from textbooks illustrates Mr. Brin's and R McElreath points exactly.
BASIC is neither obscure or obsolete. The majority of customized business applications running today were written in Visual Basic. Unfortunately the push from Microsoft to move this market segment to C# does nothing to build a common language. Microsoft's model of "embrace and extend" is actually divide and conquer.
Programming is programming. It is FAR better to be exposed to the concepts by age 10 then for adults to think you are a "computer expert" because you have a page on MySpace.
