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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
How old are you?
My kids 8 and 11 are digging into the code behind the program. Check out:
http://robocode.sourceforge.net/
And yes some painters do still grind their piagments -- see the famous sidewalk chalk painters of the day.
Get with dude your so living in the past with BASIC.
Kind Regards
First, the kid should learn LISP, not BASIC, because LISP is so much cooler. There are a few free LISP interpreters out there, such as XLISP or CLISP. LISP rules! Second, though they don't ship them with every copy of Windows XP, you can download free versions of Visual BASIC and Visual C from Microsoft. Not with a dial-up though; the free VB install file I got is 435 MB! If 435 MB is too porkmatic for you, you can get Turbo C v.2.01 for free off Borland's web site; complete with help files, it's still only 1.1 MB.
Started out with a Radioshack Color Computer 2 with 16k of memory on a color TV. Had a cassette tape drive and thermal printer. Wrote my first book report on what amounted to a cash register reciept and got a good grade on it in elementry.
Loved basic, wrote a dungeon crawler in it along with a bunch of other programs. Kids needs basic as much as people cringe at it now. I remember experimenting around with graphics in CGA. Making different patterns and things on the screen. Then tinkered with a drawing program out of a book all in basic.
Eventually I went on to doing C, C++, Java, etc. Still basic is and always will be the best language to start programming in. It's a shame it's not around any more and with proper education you can over come basic's short falls in programming style easly if and when you decide to move on.
I've been coding since I was 13 or so and I'm currently in a PhD program in CS. While I agree that many modern programming packages are daunting, highly complicated and difficult for a beginner to sink his/her teeth into (I still yearn for the days of Borland Turbo C), there are still many options. For one, I highly recomend looking at perl, python, shell scripts, etc. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that you can trace the algorithm with paper when using basic... with the exception of perl (which I admit is a little strange), with most languages its perfectly clear whats going on and a manual trace is still very easy. Yes, its true that the GOTO statement is dead, but, honestly, that just leads to confusion in larger programs.
In any case, my biggest recomendation to your son is to do what I did when I got bored in math class in high school: get a Texas Instruments TI-83 graphing calculator. They have a version of basic on board and you can do some pretty nifty things with the programming language including access to the all the graphing and mathematical functions. I remember as little as 7 years ago, spending a couple weeks programming games on the calculator, optimizing it to get it to run more quickly, and distributing it to my friends so they'd have something to goof off with in class.
Dr. Brin,
I just wanted to write and say thank you for writing this article! I'm 30 years old and while I'm now a graduate student in medieval lit., I spent most of my 20's working in IT -- something I don't think would have come about without noodling around on a C-64 when I was a kid.
Something else that occurred to me while reading this is that there are emulators for a lot of the older hardware. I just downloaded one called CCS64 (it can be found at http://www.computerbrains.com/ccs64/). I haven't tried it yet so I cannot recommend it one way or the other, but I thought I should mention the option.
Lastly, if I can take a moment to be a gushing fanboy, I just read the entirety of the Uplift series and enjoyed it throughly. I'd like to see more stories set in that universe, perhaps in the vein of the first trilogy, if the mood ever strikes you.
Thanks,
--Matt
I am 25, and didnt get the old APPLE II computers. What was my save all, was te TI series of graphics calculators. I have since moved onto the field of mid-level and upper-level languages, but I agree, those basic lines of BASIC, are what got me, and kept me in... just a thought.
Smalltalk was invented by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. It's a fantastic language for education as it uses the object-oriented approach to programming - everything is an object and responds to messages. It's very similar to the way the real world works - we're surrounded by objects that have attributes and we interact with them through the equivalent of messages (we 'talk' to a friend, 'open' a door and so on). It's graphical, programs don't need to be compiled and beat of all - rock-steady.
From a very early stage, children were brought into the labs and given Smalltalk as their first programming experience - they love it. Without the preconceptions we have as grown programmers they take to it like ducks to water. The same is true of adults who've never programmed, I was part of the Open University's team that taught Smalltalk to over 4000 students a year. With almost no exceptions give someone Smalltalk and they can program.
Whilst die-hard programmers can always use industrial strength Smalltalk-80; there is hope for everyone. Alan Kay went away to Disney of all companies and built a new version of Smalltalk called Squeak. It's attractive, powerful, portable and comes with loads of interactive toys designed to encourage the exploration of the language. When you get bored of those, it's pure Smalltalk under the hood.
Oh and its free.
http://www.squeak.org/
I, like the author, got my first taste of programming in BASIC back in the 80's. I had a Tandy color computer with a cassette drive and dual 5.25" floppies, and I completely agree that this has given me a solid understanding of computers that has helped me to this day. However, BASIC is not your only option. A fantastic, but usually overlooked, BASIC 'like' scripting language that is easy to learn and fun to use is AppleScript. Its simple English like code and easy to use Script Editor makes it fun for kids to learn and use. Moreover, it's a useful tool for scripting repetative tasks as well. But the fun doesn't stop there, the language is useable with Apple's Cocoa environment allowing you to easily create script driven application interfaces. In addition the Mac comes with a UNIX terminal in which kids can be taught shell scripting, a useful skill to this day.
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