Why Johnny can't code

[Charles Pegge]

This Article prompted over 300 replies that raised many interesting points both for and against BASIC as an educational language.


http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2006/09/14/basic/index.html
David Brin 2006



IT SHOULD BE BASIC
Once again, I had the weekly cover article on Salon, the greatest online magazine, and it stirred even more controversy than with my infamous Star Wars essay, or my appraisal of technological secrecy/privacy in the future. This time it wasn't intentional!

In "Why Johnny Can't Code" I point out that the simple programming language BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming. They cannot even do the little exercises that are still in many classroom textbooks. What I didn't expect was the flurry of intensely passionate replies!


http://www.davidbrin.com/

[danbaron]

My experience is that it takes a long time to get into salon.com. I'm trying now.

But, a long time ago, I think, computers were only used for computing. Then, later, they were primarily used for computing. Now, they are overwhelmingly used for communicating and entertainment.

Now I got into salon. I looked a little bit at the article. I don't have too much time now.

When you buy a computer now, guess what? - it comes with no computer language. There is no apparent command line prompt, and there is no pre-installed Basic interpreter. You can't easily write a simple Basic program to display graphics on the screen.

The Apple II computers made programming so easy and fun for the beginner. The Macintosh immediately made everything harder.

I think there should be at least one computer today, which is designed for fun computing, like the old Apple IIs. People trying to make simple programs don't need Windows 7, and the Windows API. They need a simple operating system, with a Basic interpreter that lets them do whatever the machine is capable of doing.

There was a discussion previously here about a potential new Amiga computer. I think the goal of it, was/is to make computing easy, simple, and fun for the user - to make a computer for people who like to compute. The idea of the Apple IIgs was the same - it came from Steve Wozniak. But, there wasn't enough profit there, and, I think Steve Jobs killed it for the Macintosh.

Concerning whether kids should start learning computing using Basic - not too many people start learning math by studying calculus, right? Would it be better for kids to use Lisp or Haskell as their first programming language?