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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.
By David Brin

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  • Thursday, September 14, 2006 11:23 AM

    Dijkstra is Rolling over in his grave

    "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

    -Edsger Dijkstra, 1975

    You can find an archive of his lectures and notes here:

    http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

    As for the person whose parent(s) wouldn't let him have an atari, I had an atari 1200 which was fully programmable. I coded in basic, I loaded and saved to tape and later to disk. The 8 bit atari systems were much different than the 2600.

    —Malcalypse

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