Read other letters about this article

• Wednesday, September 13, 2006 09:02 PM

  BASIC may be a little too easy to find

  I agree with many of the other letter writers: BASIC is a poor means of introducing children to programming. BASIC is relatively inflexible, encourages a loose, non-functional code structure ("spaghetti code"), and is difficult to debug. More importantly, though, BASIC provides no support for learning fundamental patterns of programming. That is, there are no guidelines built into the language to help beginning programmers understand tradeoffs in structuring their code.

  BASIC also tends to encourage a focus on line-by-line semantics rather than more general coding concepts. This is a problem for every beginning programmer, but is particularly problematic for girls. Much of the research devoted to understanding why girls tend not to enter or remain in computer science programs has found that they were turned-off by language-particular tinkering at the expense of a focus on fundamental algorithms. However, this critique is also true of many other suggestions found in these letters (e.g., Perl, PHP). The author seems uninterested in educational programming languages, but some have been quite successful, such as Alice (http://www.alice.org/).

  I also agree with other letter writers that it bodes poorly for an article when it begins with such a preposterous opening paragraph -- finding a simple BASIC compiler is trivial.

  —madpickle Read madpickle's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel