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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
I have written tens of thousands of lines of BASIC code on everything from a UNIVAC 1108 to an Apple II and I am rather fond of the language. Over about the last 10 years I noticed that programming was getting less and less fun. I was spending all my time looking up objects in the documentation instead of writing code.
How true about looking up objects. Searching the documentation has become such a major part of programming. Now that you've mentioned it, it is striking just how much things have changed.
But then reusability was one of the big advantages of object-oriented programming that got everyone excited back when it was still exciting.
Reusability felt more exciting as a concept than it feels as a day-to-day reality.
If you really want to have your child learn Basic, why not simply refer them to one of the many free basic interpreters. You can work with your teacher to find one that's easy to use for your children - or you can look yourself.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtml
The reality is that good old BASIC is free of charge to anyone who wants to download one of the many implementations available. There are versions that run on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc., so there's no excuse for not having one available for your children once you know they're available.
I haven't read the other letters so I apologize if this is redundant, but I will say this: your son is 200+ pages into his book on C++. At this point he should be drunk on its power and possibility, and ready to get into some serious coding (Tetris or Sudoku might be good projects). Why cripple him with BASIC just because its "easy for beginners"? It's like teaching someone using a Les Paul, then once he's gotten pretty good, switching him over to a My First Guitar toy.
I read the article, as well as a significant number of the response letters, and was astonished at the narrowness of the responses.
The one thing that kept popping into my mind was an Arthur C. Clarke quote - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The bigger point this article makes, and that practically no one responded too, was the issue of young people not really understanding what is happening behind the scenes of just about anything these days.
Try it yourself. Ask someone how practically any modern device works, such as a TV, or a CD player. The most frequent reply is a blank stare.
Clearly, some of this is due to lack of interest, but a lot of it also has to do with people not being exposed to actually getting their hands dirty doing these things nowadays. You can't tinker with today's devices the way you used to, and if you can, it's more convenient to have someone else fix or install it.
Come on, any kid that can learn and enjoy Basic can do the same with Python. The only thing Python doesn't have that Basic does is line numbers. And teaching kids to write spaghetti code from the beginning can't be a good thing.
There's a simple scripting language built into the Windows OS: VBScript. Nothing to buy, nothing to install, you save the text file as .VBS and run it from the command prompt. Scriptng is a great gateway to "real" programming and a useful skill to have.
I played with BASIC as a teen like the author did, and I made little programs, but what really taught me what I could do with programming was not the language but the dearth of games available to me. I had one game which loaded from tape--too much trouble a lot of the time. Therefore, I'd type in games from a programming book I bought. That's how I got my start: needing to do it. I started writing my own games.
"This is not just a matter of cheating a generation, telling them to simply be consumers of software, instead of the innovators that their uncles were."
Of course the current generation missing out on BASIC couldn't be the children of those 70s tinkerer nerds. They must be the nieces and nephews. Sheesh.
Seems obvious: Use today's "data access" computers to access a web site that delivers a BASIC environment via Javascript. OS functions like storage and network comms could be routed through the server (in typical Ajax style).
Geeze, that would make a cool late-night project. Contact me if someone wants to finance the building of such a site.
I've been programming since high school. I remember the excitement of buying magazines like compute or Commodore Users Ahoy! and typing in the code in them.
And doing that taught me how to program. Now, into my 13th year as a professional sw developer, I can always spot the commodore user in my team. It turns out they're the ones that can grok problem solving. I don't know, it's like that Joel Spolski's observation about people missing the part of the brain that understands pointers.
I also remember a quote from Isaac Asimov, comparing the printing press and computers. People couldn't read, so they needed professional readers and writers. So, books were rare. Then the printing press came along and people learned to read and write. His point was that as long as common people don’t write their own programs, a similar revolution will not happen.
Hello?
I'm really surprised that out of all of the letters here, nobody has mentioned Squeak or Logo, both of which are aimed at children as a First Programming Language.
Both have shiny, lickable graphics and teach programming as a form of play while exposing students to the concepts logic, reason, causality, etc. Both are eminently available on both the Mac and PC platform, and Squeak(a version of Smalltalk, the original Object-Oriented programming language) has the plus of actually being used in real-world practical applications.
For God's sake, DON'T teach them Perl. Write-only is not a principle that children should be exposed in their first encounter with programming.
The absolute worst that could happen to them if they learn Squeak is that they get an early start on being a snooty Computer Science OO purist and insist there's nowhere else they could POSSIBLY ever go to college except for Berkeley or Stanford....short of the tuition bills, this is pretty much everything a parent could hope for, no?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
