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Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:00 AM

Why Johnny can't code

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.

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  • Wednesday, September 13, 2006 06:40 PM

    You've got to be kidding me.

    Aside from the many sources for BASIC that previous writers have mentioned, I'd like to know exactly what it is that Brin is looking for in BASIC that can't be done in, say, Python. Sure, the language has object oriented features, and a large standard library, but you don't have to use them. You can use 'print' and 'input' and do old style terminal programming just like the good ole days. In fact, I recently helped one of my students do exactly the sort of thing that Brin alludes to in this piece: The physics teacher had given this kid some old algorithm in basic, and I helped him re-write it in Python. The only thing that was really different was the BASIC notation for arrays vs the Python list notation. So what's the big deal?

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