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The Little Coder's Predicament
An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article
on Advogato about the world of computing that kids today find themselves in compared to the world that kids in the 80's found themselves in. Learning to program in the 80's was simpler because the machines were more limited, and generally came with BASIC. Now we have Windows, which typically comes with no built-in programming language. What can be done to improve the situation?"
It's a complete development environment, allows the kid to learn object oriented programming without the kruft of something like C++. And it is actually used in the real world.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
I was 9 when I started programming, and it was in BASIC on a TI-99, which I'm not certain but I think it was called CRAP-BASIC. Moving to a PC with GW-BASIC was a big upgrade. :)
:)
Anyway, I do not think that BASIC is a good learning language. BASIC encourages bad programming practices. Not C either, simply because it's got too many loaded guns you have to ensure aren't pointed at your foot. Something like Java, or Python, or whatever where you can learn programming concepts without having to also learn hardware concepts. Though eventually those should be learned as well, but not necessarily at age 9.
But yes, having GW-BASIC or whatever available is the only reason I learned to program. And to people suggesting Linux -- that works great for your or my children, but what about the children of parents like mine, who aren't programmers themselves and aren't going to be putting Linux on their computers any time soon?
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Oh Jebus no. If I see one more resume with "HTML programmer" on it I'll fucking scream.