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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
I too learned basic in school in the 70's.
For a current intro into the world of programming I would give a kid either "LOGO" for kids up to 10 (I think my dog could learn LOGO) and Flash or Runtime Revolution (hypercard on steroids) for older kids.
All of these tools will illustrate programming concepts as well as giving a lot of exciting results for relatively little effort. Flash is especially rewarding, because of its easy handling of all kinds of media and strong math abilities. You can actually make some decent games with it pretty easily. It also has a huge user community with millions of tutorials and examples.
As I recall, Basic was pretty boring compared to hypercard, as it took dozens of lines of code to do even a simple graphic, and keeping track of those paper tapes was a drag.
I have been in the business of developer tools for the last eight years, having launched one version of BASIC into every major international market (realbasic), managed the worldwide sales of and owned one advanced databse technology company for developers, . First, I assure you that computer software engineering is alive in education, based on sales of these products into the worldwide education market. However, especially in the United States, programs are administered locally and pretty much at whim at the district level or lower. Don't expect uniformity in education - it was never really there to begin with.
On the other hand, Ive been a parent for over 13 years. The presence of software on a computer doesnt make any difference whatsoever, no more so than a book on a shelf - its the will of the parent to engage their children in intellectual activities.
And David, if you bemoan the loss of embedded BASIC - maybe its time that you polished your programming skills and tried one of the many languages out there.
It is obvious that writers like rshannon don't "get it" or know much about BASIC.
"Something obscure like BASIC, something needing line numbers and using non-intuitive words like PRINT to display things on a screen"
There are modern object oriented versions of BASIC like REALbasic that share the easy to understand syntax that made BASIC a universal language.
The content of most letters on this article indicate we are descending to a modern Tower of Babel because there is no agreement or acceptance of a common language to teach our kids. The response from the education community to remove code snippets from textbooks illustrates Mr. Brin's and R McElreath points exactly.
BASIC is neither obscure or obsolete. The majority of customized business applications running today were written in Visual Basic. Unfortunately the push from Microsoft to move this market segment to C# does nothing to build a common language. Microsoft's model of "embrace and extend" is actually divide and conquer.
Programming is programming. It is FAR better to be exposed to the concepts by age 10 then for adults to think you are a "computer expert" because you have a page on MySpace.
Just an experience I have had.
A few years ago a recent university graduate (from a well-known local university) with a Masters degree in Computer Science joined the company I worked for. In the team project meetings, he was eager, had excellent design ideas. Each team member had a part of the project they had to code. When the time came to integrate the various pieces, his piece of the project was completely unusable, and basically not done. He left for another job.
We were very surprised. He knew the concepts and some of his ideas were incorporated into the design, but how could a Master of Computer Science not know how to program?
Java applications (as opposed to applets, servlets, etc.) are plenty easy. Two major IDE's are free: Eclipse and NetBeans.
Java can be used for simple "Hello World" programs as well as very complex graphical and browser-based applications. It runs on nearly all platforms, including many PDA's and cellphones. It's ubiquitous in the enterprise, used by IBM, Oracle, and almost everyone else except Microsoft. It's a very marketable skill.
About the only downside I can think of is that the IDE's like lots of memory, 512MB minimum, and large displays.
Greg
Problem is not lack of Basic, its doing something visible quick to keep kids interested, take a look at:
http://www.softronix.com/logo.html
Or go with scripting language like Ruby.
I guess everyone is allowed a "why has the world changed for the worse" rant, but this is an exceptionally silly one. There is no shortage of young people getting hooked on programming, either through current languages like LOGO or VB or Python or Ruby or Java, or the Mindstorms language - and there is no shortage of new programming ideas, from web 2.0 new new types of hardware, and of course, lots of stuff that has nothing to do with computers.
But clunky BASIC as Brin experienced it was just ... clunky. What does matter is that there are tools to capture a child's imagination and empower it. And in that regard I think we've gone backwards quickly in the last five years - and arguably, US education has been awful and getting worse since before I was a child - no child allegedly left behind or no. Unfortunately, the lack of Apple BASIC is entirely irrelevant to that problem.
As a student who grew up after the craze of BASIC, I can sympathize with the struggle to find a good way to do introductory programming. I remember reading a book about fibbinocci numbers and there being a program to print out the numbers and ratios. My dad and brother both did quite a bit of programming so there were plenty of IDEs and compilers to go around. Unfortunately, none of them were able to accept the simple commands that were provided in the book.
The closest thing I ever found to BASIC interpreter was on something that nearly every high school student uses: a calculator. Most of the modern graphing calculators nowadays have the ability to write small programs in a rudimentary form of basic; all the commands are available in the menus of the calculators. The instruction manual that comes with the calculator explains some of the commands but allows for enough exploration. All the basic functions (if/then/else, for, while, etc) along with some calculator specific ones are present. While it is true that many more advanced functions of higher level languages are not available, many of the math functions of the calculator can be used to immitate programming functions, giving an even deeper appreciation for the mathmatical nature of computer science. I asked my parents for a Ti-83+ for the sole reason that I could program it. I read the instruction book and created a few programs that were a lot of fun, even if they were very simple. The knowledge that I gained from programming a very simple device helped me when I moved on to higher level languages. I've had that calculator for going on 7 years and I still occasionally write programs in it. A quick google can show many ways to turn what can become a mathamatical crutch into a superb introduction to programming.
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