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Read other letters about this article
(*I accululated a lot of responses and compiled much to say, so this will have to be done in two parts. Thanks for your patience.)
Part 1.
Yes, I got a LOT of mail about the Salon article “Whay Johnny Can’t Code.” Direct letters to both my web site (http://www.davidbrin.com) and blog as well as to Salon itself. What shocked me was the degree of passion... no, in some cases bilious rage(!)... that my effrontery provoked. In comparison, mere politics and religion seem to have mild effects!
A majority were rants about the benefits of a particular language for teaching programming to kids. Everyone had a favorite. Very few seemed willing to step back and see the big picture. Which is that - no matter the nenefits of this or that language - the simple fact is that 99% of kids currently never see any of them. At all. Moreover, they cannot.
To a large degree, many letter writers appear not to have even bothered to read the article, leaping to a wrong conclusion that I was touting BASIC as somehow better than other, later languages, or line coding in preference to object oriented programming. There are, indeed, both logical and historical reasons why at least some exposure to the simple syntax and direct implementation of algorithms might be very good for students to have at least tasted, sometime. But that was NOT the article’s point, at all.
Only a small minority seemed at all interested in even looking at my core idea, which was how to create a nice, comfortable and widely shared starting ground for millions of kids, so they could all (all!) use their computers to do a little COMPUTING for mild classroom assignments, and so get an introduction of this way of looking at the world.
Indeed, the tiniest fraction seemed to grasp how valuable it once was (but no longer) for ALL kids to be able to easily type in little illustrative examples at the end of each math or physics chapters. Nearly everyone seemed to assume it could still be done. But it cannot.
I’ll repeat that. It simply cannot be done.
It does no good to preach what languages kids SHOULD have access to. Or how trivial the letter writer feels that it is to download this or that from some specialized site, or to probe the inner sanctums of the Unix Kernel or hidden layers of MSVB. Again, most kids and parents aren’t download-geeks or layer detectives. In EFFECT most don’t have easy and direct turorial access to any computer language. Period.
A few writers were actually calm enough to step back and contemplate this weird situation, in which we’ve distributed hundreds of millions of computers that cannot compute. Earnest folks did offer a few solutions that might plausibly address the problem in a practical way.
1) Somehow persuade Microsoft to care. In which case, with a fingernail’s effort, they could offer micro-implementations of Basic, Python, Scratch, and half a dozen other excellent introductory languages as a public service, in versions tuned precisely to be usable as classroom and homework demos. Each could even come with a “launchpad” to purchase and download expanded versions, if the kids’ interest is sparked. Nobody would mind them making some money downstream. Especially since the upstream, initial cost in both money and onboard memory would be trivial.
2) Some place with an historical interest in Basic (like Dartmouth) could create a slimmed version, along with maybe a hundred little 12-line programs that illustrate everything from statistics to galilean laws of motion to PONG, and offer this “perfect turnkey download” for text publishers to link to. (BTW, did you know that TrueBasic http://www.truebasic.com/ is still being offered? I didn't know myself until 30 seconds ago. 40 bucks for the dumbed down version. Includes some demo programs, apparently. Sounds like no solution, alas.)
3) A small scale attempt worth noting: KidBASIC http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/ appears to have been inspired by this article! It aims to be an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It's a strictly line-oriented language, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.
