
Why Teach Programming with BASIC - fogus
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1319327833/clubcompy-kids-heart-computers/posts/46045
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blacksmythe
I learned to program with BASIC when I was young, but can't imagine why I
would teach someone to program using BASIC when Python is available as an
alternative.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
If your goal is doing something practical with the machine, Python is
certainly a better choice than BASIC. On the other hand, from an educational
standpoint, BASIC shares an important trait with Pascal: It doesn't do much
out of the box. In BASIC you have to do some work to extract the minimum
element of a list, swap two numbers, maintain a resizable array and any number
of other trivial "algorithms" that Python's language features and libraries
provide. Is it so hard to see that more sophisticated languages can take away
opportunities to learn the fundamentals from scratch and gain an intuitive
grasp of algorithm design?

~~~
steveklabnik
The problem is, without a lot out of the box, kids just aren't going to stay
interested.

HELLO THERE

HELLO THERE

HELLO THERE

HELLO THERE

HELLO THERE

HELLO THERE

^C

just isn't interesting anymore.

Simplicity is important, but you should be able to do complex things in a
simple manner. At least, that's the approach that I'm taking with Hackety.

~~~
dkarl
I don't think you need to worry about that. I had played entertaining video
games before I started programming, and never produced anything of similar
quality. None of the games I made came anywhere close to resembling the glitz
and glamor of the media or video games I loved. It's easy to look back at the
1980s and see nothing but drabness, and conclude that programming provided a
competitive entertainment experience, but that's not what it was like at the
time. Sometimes I'd borrow a new game disk from somebody, boot from the 5.25"
floppy, and the graphics would _blow me away_. Nothing like the crappy
graphics I could make. I wrote programs to solve math programs, generate
mathematical patterns on the screen, quiz me on my schoolwork, and do simple
text-based games that were already lame by the previous decade's standards.
Unless you were truly exceptional, the games you wrote for yourself did not
compare at all with the excitement of games you could buy for a PC or an Apple
II, and even the truly exceptional kids who created entertaining video games
had to be willing to slog through hours of hard, unglamorous work. Kids today
who expect programming to be entertaining the same way movies and video games
are entertaining will do exactly what those kids did in the eighties: turn up
their nose at programming and do something else. Kids who enjoy programming
will program.

~~~
steveklabnik
I'm right there with you man. That was me, too. My first computer experience
was Adventure, and I basically made text adventures for the first few years I
was programming.

That said, Pong in Shoes is 50 lines. It's pretty simple, and gives you an
actual game. I wrote the basics of a SNS era RPG, and it was around 300 or so.
I don't think this is a bad thing.

------
Jach
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have
had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." ~Edsger W. Dijkstra

~~~
Devilboy
I learned with BASIC back in the early 90s when I was still very young.

Dijkstra was right :(

~~~
rbanffy
I learned BASIC on an Apple II+ and I don't think Dijkstra was right on that
one. It's really a different path than the one Dijkstra endorses, but it's not
more or less wrong than any other.

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ygd
What could they possibly need $25K for? As far as I can tell, all it is is a
web app + a magazine/book.

~~~
chromatic
$25k is 500 one-year subscriptions. That's the point at which the printed
magazine makes economic sense.

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byoung2
_This project will only be funded if at least $25,000 is pledged by Wednesday
Dec 29, 6:19am EST_

At only $815 so far, they have a long way to go in half a day

~~~
chromatic
That's okay--we're willing to revise our strategy. If the Kickstarter approach
doesn't work, we'll try something else.

------
boneheadmed
BASIC on the Apple II was my first programming language and I loved it at the
time. Once my kids are a little older, I'm going to start with Ruby. One thing
that was very helpful learning basic on the old Apple was that you could use
the command line to examine variables and also program on the fly. This is
similar to Ruby's IRB. Being able to tinker with a program without having to
compile first is very instructive and most of all fun!

