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• Friday, September 15, 2006 05:53 AM

  Redux on redux on "Why Johnny can't code"

  Mr. Brin writes, in attempting to illustrate why many don't "get" his article:

  "Something obscure or needing downloads… can you really convince yourself that we’ll get a majority of kids to experience that?"

  To which, of course, one can only respond:

  Something obscure like BASIC, something needing line numbers and using non-intuitive words like PRINT to display things on a screen ... can you really convince yourself that we'll get a majority of kids to experience that?

  You wouldn't teach skiing with old fashioned non-quick-release bindings.

  You wouldn't teach driving with old fashioned non-sycnromesh clutches.

  You wouldn't teach carpentry with old fashioned no-saftey-cutoff, no-guard bench tools.

  So why, Mr. Brin, are you insisting that programming be taught with an absolute dog of an interpreted language? That's all that BASIC is. There are many other languages in that class.

  Face it, you preferred loading programs from a cassette player with your son, than downloading something from the internet. Trading something he's familiar with for something you were once familiar with.

  And you wonder why plenty of letter writers can't see past your nostalgia!

  There are new, modern, better interpreted languages out there, where the connection to "what happens beneath" is in fact far better than it was in BASIC.

  Every single lesson a beginner would learn in BASIC can be more clearly understood, more quickly surpassed, using a modern interpreted programming language.

  Better yet, connections from these languages to something a modern kid might actually want to do (jazz up a webpage, program a game in Flash, etc.) are well-defined and actually work.

  Something you cannot say for BASIC.

  You say you want "something for everyone". A "lingua franca". Science fiction writers often overestimate the utility of a "galactic common" or simply presuppose that in the future everyone will speak Amglish.

  In truth there is far more to be gained than lost by having many languages; modes of expression; and if you accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the concomitant ways of thinking.

  It's the same with computer languages. The multiplicity of options for a beginner programmer these days is not a bad thing, but rather a sign of a healthy industry in its prime, and a sign that "Johnny" will be able to code rings around the likes of you and me.

  If only we'll stop hamstringing the poor kid with our nostalgia for the bad old days.

  —shannonr Read shannonr's other letters
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