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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 06:03 AM

  I agree with the author

  The author's article brought back memories of my early tinkering with the various programming languages.

  To tell the truth, I never liked BASIC. That is not important. What's important is exactly what the author

  is talking about:Having his son learn the rudiments of programming while stepping through a language. The other key point

  is not having to load a GUI and learn what all the menus are. Sit down and write code. Fun. Learn. Period.

  I also used BASIC on my Commodore 64 to work out the mathematics before I committed the code to punch cards in my FORTRAN class.

  As a programming language I can't stand it. As a pedagogical tool for young people it's excellent.

  Truth be told I'm an embedded systems programmer who also writes apps in C#. I know colleges are now teaching Java and/or C#

  as first programming courses and I feel that's a wrong way to go. Object-Oriented software is cool. However if you have no

  context for why it's cool you'll never get it. When you have to struggle with organizing and packaging C code into larger

  meaningful units you can appreciate the beauty of OO. You can also write clean and efficielnt code.

  Some of the commentators decry BASIC's GOTO statement and how it leads to spaghetti code. Precisely the point. The admonition

  to never use a GOTO in procedural languages makes no sense unitl you've used a GOTO and debugged your code. Context is everything.

  (To the author: I still have my Motorola 6800 trainer that I bought and built from Heathkit and used to teach myself the rudiments

  of programming. I've been looking for a good home for it for nearly 25 years. I have all the original manuals as well).

  —JerryFrag Read JerryFrag's other letters
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