Why Johnny can't code

'BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.'

I have to say that, much as I love more modern higher-level languages (why else would I be here), BASIC was what I grew up on, and really was ideal for picking up a first understanding of what programming is all about. With its global variables, GOTOs and all. It gets the computer obeying your command and following your logic with the absolute minimum learning curve. You don't have to learn any more abstractions than are absolutely necessary in order to feel that power (wow, it actually does what I tell it to, step by step!) and get yourself hooked.

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Ben has long complained that his math textbooks all featured little type-it-in-yourself programs at the end of each chapter -- alongside the problem sets -- offering the student a chance to try out some simple algorithm on a computer. Usually, it's an equation or iterative process illustrating the principle that the chapter discussed. These "TRY IT IN BASIC" exercises often take just a dozen or so lines of text. The aim is both to illustrate the chapter's topic (e.g. statistics) and to offer a little taste of programming.

...

Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting -- and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper -- say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.

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The parallel technology of the '70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore's Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.

So, what's the parallel hobby skill today? What tech-marvel has boys and girls enthralled, tinkering away, becoming expert in something dazzling and practical and new? Shooting ersatz aliens in "Halo"? Dressing up avatars in "The Sims"? Oh sure, there's creativity in creating cool movies and Web pages. But except for the very few who will make new media films, do you see a great wave of technological empowerment coming out of all this?

...

While trawling through eBay, one day, he came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.

"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"


"Well, look, Dad. Have you seen what it costs to buy one of those old Apples online, in its original box? Hey, what could we do with it?"

"Huh?" I stared in amazement.

Then, gradually, I realized the practical possibilities.

Let's cut to the chase. We did not wind up buying an Apple II. Instead (for various reasons) we bought a Commodore 64 (in original box) for $25. It arrived in good shape. It took us maybe three minutes to attach an old TV. We flicked the power switch ... and up came a command line. In BASIC.

Uh. Problem solved?

I guess. At least far better than any other thing we've tried!

We are now typing in programs from books, having fun making dots move (and thus knowing why the dots move, at the command of math, and not magic). There are still problems, like getting an operating system to make the 5141c disk drive work right. Most of the old floppies are unreadable. But who cares? (Ben thinks that loading programs to and from tape is so cool. I gurgle and choke remembering my old Sinclair ... but whatever.)

What matters is that we got over a wretched educational barrier. And now Ben can study C++ with a better idea where it all came from. In the nick of time.

Problem solved? Again, at one level.

And yet, can you see the irony? Are any of the masters of the information age even able to see the irony?

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. No, this goes way beyond that. In medical school, professors insist that students have some knowledge of chemistry and DNA before they are allowed to cut open folks. In architecture, you are at least exposed to some physics.

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Let me reiterate. Kids are not doing "something else" other than BASIC. Not millions of them. Not hundreds or tens of thousands of them. Hardly any of them, in fact. It is not their fault. Because some of them, like my son, really want to. But they can't. Not without turning into time travelers, the way we did, by giving up (briefly) on the present and diving into the past.

...

In contrast, Microsoft and Apple and all the big-time education-computerizing reformers of the MIT Media Lab are failing, miserably. For all of their high-flown education initiatives (like the "$100 laptop"), they seem bent on providing information consumption devices, not tools that teach creative thinking and technological mastery.

Web access for the poor would be great. But machines that kids out there can understand and program themselves? To those who shape our technical world, the notion remains not just inaccessible, but strangely inconceivable.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/

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toto by mohlo byt fajn, nemam cas skusat:
http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/

a toto video znie strasne drbnuto, ale podstata sa mi paci..
stare dobre casy, ked som nic v basicu nevedel, ale pomocou helpu a pomocou prikladov v helpe, som dokazal nakodit kopu hluposti..