Site Presented By
Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
I agree with the suggestions to take a look at Rebol. I began learning about computing in Basic on one of the earliest Radio Shack machines, and then the Commodore 64, IBM 8088, etc. I first looked at Rebol because it could be picked up so naturally by beginners - in my opinion and experience even more naturally than those old Basics, but it's much deeper and more practical/useful for real work. As expected, everyone here has suggested their favorite languages, but none are small or simple enough to solve the problem of immediate use. Rebol's trivially small to download (<600k on most operating systems) and can be used immediately, with or without installing. Rebol code can run unchanged on over 40 operating systems, and can be used to build applications with modern graphics, CGI interfaces, network functionality, database connectivity, etc... But it's still simple enough to be used immediately, in the same way as those old Basic interpreters. I've never seen another package that's so quickly usable in so many ways, especially by beginners. It's a shame so few people even know it exists. Take a look at:
http://musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html
OK, there are lots of BASIC's about, but for children DarkBasic (www.thegamecreators.com) seems pretty good; lots of very simple commands to make cubes and spheres etc. eg Make object sphere (size)!
'Johnny', aged 9, has 50 randomly placed planets with his spaceship flying around between them and a screen view that is following the ship.
Thankfully, DarkBasic is compatible with my recollections of ZX Basic but this doesnt mean that firing bullets in 3D space is going to be a simple task!
If youve got Lego Mindstorms, try NotQuiteC inside BriccX. He used this last winter and wasnt troubled by C's arcania - that's the beauty of being young.
I still remember how much fun I had programming on early microcomputers such as the TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore PET and Atari 800. Since then, computers have become much more powerful but they have lost the simplicity that made them so easy to understand.
There is an open source project called "simpleJ" to provide that kind of learning environment on modern computers.
From the simpleJ web site: (at www.simplej.org)
"simpleJ emulates a simplified computer on your PC: a retro-style video game console that lets you understand how a computer works and write your own video game programs. The first microcomputers were quite simple. They had a few kilobytes of memory and couldn't run large programs. Many didn't even have an operating system. Yet they had something valuable: understanding everything about their hardware and software was easy. simpleJ aims to make this possible while running on modern PC hardware."
Chipmunk Basic is meant to solve your problem:
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
Basic4gl may be a bit more interesting for modern users:
http://www.basic4gl.net/
Rebol may be the most practical of all:
http://www.rebol.com/
I realise your son and you already have your access to BASIC, but I started with the Acorn Electron (the BBC's little brother) and more recently, when I wanted to get in to hobbiest game making, I picked up Dark BASIC.
There's a downloadable free trial, it's very predictable BASIC, and I believe they try to give discounts to schools. Oh, and should the user turn to liking to make games, then it's mind blowingly simple to put graphics on the screen to keep people encouraged quicker.
And then, if they want to go on to C++ without leaving the trainer wheels completely, there's Dark SDK - a set of Dark Basic libraries.
I'm happy with it, and I'm surprised you didn't find it in your searching. There's quite the active community around it too!
http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/
Good luck to you and your son in the future!
Hi, David Brin checking in again with an afterthought about how this article had genuine results!
Swedish programmer Nikko Strom read my Salon Magazine cover story “Why Johnny Can’t Code” and was among the few who seem to have actually “got” the point... that even having universal access to obsolete BASIC is better than having nothing at all... which is what millions of kids now have as a programming language on their so-called “computers.” Desktops and laptops that can do a million things... but which can no longer compute!.
(How did we ever let that come to pass? And why has no one commented on it till now?)
Many students (like my own kids) still have textbooks with “Try It In Basic” exercises... that zero percent of them are even able to try! Make that one or two percent... who have savvy professionals or super-nerds to help them download and decipher obscure interpreters. A travesty, when it would be so easy to just create a simple web site that...
Well, to see how easy, drop by Strom’s QUITE BASIC web site -
http://www.quitebasic.com/
- which he created quickly, in direct response to my article.
Wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, it is designed to ease any student through copying down a few lines of a BASIC program and not only trying it out (with a handy graphics “canvas”) but also STEP through the program, watching variables change, one line at a time! (Something I suggested in the Salon article.) Allowing the brighter students to mentally follow along, envisioning each and every incremental stage and KNOWING that it’s all about algorithms and human-made commands, not magic.
Now if only a million high school math and physics teachers could be told; with this web site, all those BASIC demos and exercises in the older texts are no longer useless! (I’m as proud of this as I am of my recent patent... and it may do more good, it seems.)
Interested in seeing another fine effort - somewhat differently done - toward a similar goal? BASIC-256 (http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/) is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.
I frankly cannot tell which approach is better for the purpose at hand. The goal of re-establishing a very simple version of BASIC as a “lingua franca” that’s available to everybody, every person who has a modern computer with web access.
Again, the aim is not to PRECLUDE other, perhaps much better alternatives, like Python or JavaScript. Frankly (and I'm tired of repeating it) I don't particularly like BASIC as a language for getting anything OTHER than simple introductory exercises done. So?
The purpose is to restore a very simple universality that textbook publishers can rely upon - as they did for a decade - well enough to assign little illustrations in class, and know that all students can then type in a few lines (perhaps the only lines of code that some of them will ever type!) ... and thereby get a little taste of moving a pixel by the power of math ... and by math alone.
Any person who has done that, even once, is less afraid of the wizard, standing behind the curtain. He or she has seen the algorithm and made the computer obey. That, alone, is an important lesson.
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
