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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 05:26 AM

  why must it be Basic?

  While I agree with the essence of your article - that understanding the 'bits that wiggle' is important (as my first manager post-graduation described it) I don't understand why it has to be basic.

  Is it only because 'old' books have basic examples (implying there are no/few examples in other languages)? Or the simplicity of typing on a terminal, typing 'run' and seeing the results? Or because basic is pseudo assembler like, with its 'goto' control flow?

  It's interesting you mention Python, albeit discarding it summarily. Personal experience has shown it to be very well suited as a teaching / introduction / exploration language.

  [An aside: My wife is a teacher, and through her I got chatting to the computer science teachers. They were having problems introducing students to programming: someone had decided that C# in visual studio was the way to go. Perhaps unsurprisingly this wasn't working well. I suggested they try python instead - the language was, after all, designed for teaching. The feedback was this proved very successful; running the interpreter provides the immediacy you mention above with the same level of learning curve. The language was both accessible and powerful enough to support all levels of ability (the brighter students moved into 3D courtesy of Visual Python).]

  So I'm interested in knowing, why Basic specifically?

  —scoot
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