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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 06:07 AM

  Longing for Basic is misguided

  I too learned Basic when I was a kid. When in college I was unfortunate enough to learn Modula II and other crappy "learning" languages. Fortunately, I soon learned Visual Basic and Web systems. This is what really inspired me to program. Today I make my living as a consultant, going from company to company fixing the bad, line-oriented code written by people who still think Basic and Cobol programming is how it all works, even in Visual Basic.

  As others have mentioned, HTML, DHTML, VBScript, Javascript and more are all available for free on every computer with a browser. I'm surprised someone who claims to be at the forefront of the computer revolution doesn't know this. Also that you claim to be part of the "creative spasm" and don't have a programming environment available for your kid.

  In addition, Microsoft Word, Excel, etc... come with VBA, which is for all intents and purposes, a learning environment for Visual Basic. You can learn many of the basics using any of these at least as well as you could using the old BASIC.

  However, if you insist on your kid learnng BASIC (and I'm sure that when he grows up, I or others like me, will be removing the GOTO statements from his Object Oriented modules), why don't you get some of the Popular Mechanics magazines from the late 60s through the early 80s and make him build his own computer? Sure, he'll have to program it at the very lowest level and at best he'll end up with a rudimentary calculator, but think of how much he'll learn about the "nuts and bolts"

  —Lynx Read Lynx's other letters
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