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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?"
Second, once they've got the basics down, get them something a bit more practical. Cygwin is free, and comes with gcc/gc++ and friends. Or even break down and spend a few bucks on Visual Basic (or, if they're really bright, a second hard drive with Linux/*BSD/whatever, so they can pick up GTK+ or QT or whichever widget set is trendy these days).
Most of the advogato article's suggestions are at best silly. I think he's promoting the return of LOGO, or whatever that language was where you did everything with a "turtle". Except that e apparently expects Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and everyone else to agree on a single standard, which is at best laughable. None of those game consoles even come with a keyboard any more, and I don't think you can even get keyboards for the GameCube...
Free... Multiple free programming languages, includng BASIC... GUI Editors and debuggers... Copious documentation... Responsive community...
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Now we have Windows, which typically comes with no built-in programming language
;)
Windows comes with VBScript built-in!
er..can I really call it a programming language?
Let's face it, if you want to develop software, Unix or Linux is a great way to go. The price is right, the technology is current, the compilers are included, and multiple programming languages from lowest to highest level are included/available.
So if you want your child to have the experience of becoming a techie, it behooves you to have at least one workstation around that can at LEAST dual-boot into a *ix environment, IMHO.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
When I started programming, I was 8 years old, and worked with what I had available. I made simple GW-BASIC programs and have moved on from there. Maybe OS's should think about the next generation of devlopers and include some sort of learning language to get the kids hooked when they are young. At least they could learn the concepts, and grow up moving on to bigger and better languages as I did...
Something clever...
What, did you forget about "debug"? Man, kids these days. Go to Start->Run...->"debug". There, learn! :-)
Windows does have a built-in language. More precisely, it has 2 of them, VBScript and JScript. They've been included with Windows since Win 2000 and can be downloaded for 95 & 98.
No programming language ... or BASIC.
I won't put in the obligatory Dijkstra quote, because by the time I finish this sentence, about 200 people will have posted it already.
Oh, what the hell:
Squeak is an nice environment to learn programming. It is highly portable, includes graphics, sound, and a great programming environment. See www.squeak.org for more info.
Bah!
All you people do is whine and whine about languages!
Back in my day, I had a bunch of OR and NOT gates and some solder. When I was very good, my parents would buy me an AND gate for my birthday. Those were the days.
Hand them a Knoppix CD and a book on Python.
Or let them get python for Windows, if you must.
There is a pascal based language called 'Turing', a language that is taught as part of many entry level computer course in high schools of Canada. There is an OO version called Object Oriented Turing, which does run under Windows. Do note that while those languages are extremely limited (to a point that is painful), I was able to do some amazing games that people stare in amazment at and that actually was the starting point of my coding life.
Do remember, those that have an interest and initiative will find themselves looking for ways to start coding, such as searching for compilers on Google and go from there.
Please direct all bug reports to
There is a neat game that uses java to make robots. Starting very simple, as you learn to program you make more powerful robots to compete against others.
IBM Robocode Home
Covered on slashdot here:
Robocode Rumble: Tips From the Champs
And here:
Learning Java Through Violence
Wax on, wax off baby!
There's a huge difference between these two. Knowing a programming language doesn't inherit that you are able to design applications. I've seen so much spaghetti code in my life, I'm really glad that development (or the ability to feed custom lines of code into your computer) became so "hard".
Sure, when I used to own a C64, I could code stuff as I wanted it to, and I knew that my code will run on everybody's else C64, too. But today, you have to develop your applications in a team, which has to run on different platforms (even Win2K and Win98 are a difference!), and has generally became very complex. But that's another story.
Every problem has a solution, but every solution creates new problems.
Learning to code is so much easier with a good structured language. Download the JDK from sun (free as in beer). That and a text editor gets you started. If you want a pretty IDE, Eclipse, Forte4J, and Borland jBuilder personal edition are all free downloads, and are fairly full featured. I am teaching my nephew to program using these tools. So far, he is picking it up fairly quickly. For teaching, I think that a strongly typed language makes it easier.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
OS X
Learn AppleScript, then Perl, then C (with GCC). All comes on the developer disk, or a free download.
If you can't get a Mac (and given how cheap the Macs are getting, that's a smaller proportion of the audience), why not start with command line batch programming, then download ActiveState Perl or Python, then learn some Java, then you can decide whether you want to sell your soul to MS and do VBA and VC++, or slap some Linux on that box.
My son has taught himself to program, with only a little guidance from me for learning how to analyze and break a problem into parts, by writing his own text adventure games using a programming language called Inform . This has worked very well - it allows him to express his creativity in the development of a scenario that requires following explicit rules to succeed, and to develop his programming skills in learning to express an algorithm that follows those rules he's created. The Inform community tends to freely share the text adventures they've written - you know a developing programmer is motivated when he spends time pouring over someone else's not-always-well documented source code.
Only a few years back a colleague brought up this very issue, and we agreed that it looked really bad. Apparently, freshmen in college back in the Spectrum days performed better in introductory programming courses.
However, I think that since then things, or at least opportunities, have improved: I am thinking of Lego Mindstorms, perhaps combined with NQC, a simple C-like language for Lego's computer brick. This kit is simply marvelous in playability, and had I had that kit as a boy, I am sure that I would have learned programming at least as well as with my Spectrum.
I don't believe this has improved freshmen's programming abilitites though, but perhaps with time?
As others have pointed out already, Linux and all its programming environments will probably provide very good starting points these days. I have for instance seen Java introductions that are more accessible than what we had in the early eighties!
Reality or nothing.
Although it's not a programming language, I've found that most of the kids getting into programming these days started by making web pages in HTML. As they wanted to do more on the web, they opened up to scripting languages, like JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, etc. That eventually led them to CGI scripting or writing Java Applets and it has progressed from there.
Most hardcore types probably cringe at the thought, but web development is really the catalyst into getting many kids interested in programming.
Most Windows machines have Office installed, which includes Visual Basic. For example, if you're at the library and someone has locked out everything except the browser and Office, try this:
/., but probably 90% of kids have access to a machine where this is possible and in three minutes they get access to a complete, powerful programming language and a trick they can use to impress their friends.
1. Open an Office app, type alt-F11.
2. You should be looking at a VB editor. From the menu, select Insert/Module.
3. Enter this code:
Sub CmdWin()
Shell ("cmd.exe")
End Sub
4. Click the arrow button. Now you should be looking at a shell window.
Simple stuff for the readers of
Neverwinter Nights comes with a toolset that includes a compiler for a C-like scripting language. A beginning programmer can write simple programs to create monsters, make them do things, cast magic spells, etc. It's got to be the most fun way to learn programming I've ever seen.
Figuring out where to start in programming is alot more difficult now than it was in the '80 due to the explosion in programming choices available (Java, C, C++, vc.net, vb.net, ...). Tools may be better (vis. Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.) but the learning curve for a new programmer to get a "hello world" program running on most platforms is steep to say the least.
I've just picked up Python and after coding in C, C++, and Java it's like a breath of fresh air. No haggling with the compiler over types, simple intuitive syntax and a very helpful interpreter that let's you test code on the fly.
Python is also free, runs on many platforms, has a huge range of modules to choose from and for a beginning programmer it's coding style is very clear (unlike perl).
New programmers can start by defining functions and then explore OO concepts as they gain confidence.
I would recommend "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz as a great starting reference.
By sticking to Java the child will tend to learn clean programming design and algorithms, rather than wild pointer debugging tricks (also the case with BASIC I might add). As an added bonus the child will be learning one of the most commercially viable languages, and one with a lnog lifetime ahead of it IMO. I'd also begin exposure to SQL (MySQL or Postgres) when you felt the child was up to the added complexity and workload. Up to this point the cost has been $0.
Once the child (now 14 or 15 I'm sure;) was proficient coding in Java, I'd suggest exploring C, assembler, drivers and low-level machine architecture. Within a couple of years any CS program in the country should be easy pickings.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
As easy to learn, but not that strong on the "bad habbits forming" part is Visual Basic. It follows a completely different programming model to "normal" newbie languages but it is much more "goal-oriented" than most beginner languages. It is also easier to produce impressive results with it, and, frankly, the VB (and Visual Studio) IDE is as good as they get.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Squeak is a cross-platform implementation of smalltalk that has developed quite the little community of educators and students around it. It allows budding programmers to start on a very basic level - something reminiscent of hypercard - but underneath it all is a real language that allows all the power and syntax you might want. As soon as you're ready, the power is there.
The scheme environment bundled with How To Design Programs has a similar goal of allowing the student to gradually ramp up the complexity of the language, but I find their rigid levels confining. Also, the programs a beginning programmer is able to put together are nowhere near as satisfying visually as what a new squeak user can build. (These kids today - in my day, we had either text or 40 by 40 graphics and we liked it.) That said, the htdp scheme environment may be more appropriate for a structured classroom environment with a series of lessons.
My only complaint about squeak is the license (despite claims on squeak.org, it's not really an open source license because of the fonts it includes); however, it is free-as-in-beer and has been already been used in elementary and middle school classrooms for both teacher- and student-created projects. (See squeakland)
At age nine is started messing around with QBASIC. Windows 3.1 had just come out and wasn't yet ubiquitous. I became quite proficient with BASIC, eventually, but by the time I had, the GUI extravaganza had begun. I was downloading and playing games for which I hadn't the slightest clue how a programmer might begin to implement such things. At some point, faced with the prospect of not being able to accomplish anything 'useful' with QBASIC, I stopped programming altogether.
I'm twenty one now and the itch to get back in to programming has been bugging me quite a bit. Now that I'm using Linux for pretty much everything -- and because Linux encourages tinkering -- I've found that scripting (Perl, Python, Ruby) languages (not THAT unlike BASIC) are the perfect place to start to refamiliarize myself with data structures and general programming concepts. The clentcher is of course that the CLI is once again useful and the programs I write can actually do something.
Namely, I've found Ruby to a great place to get started since I'm just beginning. Because Ruby is completely object orriented, it hasn't required a whole lot of reforming of the way I think about data -- everything is either a noun or a verb; an object or method. Just like the real world. After just two weeks of studying the freely available Ruby books online, I've been able to begin accomplishing basic system administration tasks. My passion for manipulating logic system is returning and I have some great ideas about what I can accomplish with it.
Sure, some day I'll probably have to pick up Java or (shudder) C++, but for now, scripting languages are the perfect entry method.
The people saying "just use Linux/FreeBSD/OtherOSS" are missing the point..
The problem isn't that Windows doesn't come with a programming language, but that there is no "learning system" in place..
I grew up in the 80's, and I learned to program first with my Vic-20, then with the C64..
I learned by typing in programs found in Compute! magazine and Compute!'s Gazette..
Such an environment simply doesn't exist today - even with Linux or FreeBSD (or how about Java if you don't want to learn a new OS?) the internet makes it harder to get into.. Instead of spending time typing the code in, you just download it.. sure, you can read it if you want, but reading about something is not the same as doing it - you don't get the same experience out of it.
Physically, programming is typing stuff, but with the internet, there's no incentive to actually do it - and like most other animals, people are (by nature) lazy.. so even if they have the drive to learn, they might not have the drive to actually do the work.
I tried using Robocode to teach my nephew how to code, but it's just not the same thing - he wanted to learn to program (still does, actually) but he gave up after just playing with it for awhile.. typing into a computer to get it to do something was just too foreign to him.
And Windows 95 had QBasic on the CD.
The problem is - where to find the documentation to get started. Windows built in help is useless...
It seems there's a bit of documentation on Microsoft's web site under http://www.microsoft.com/scripting/...
o/~ Join us now and share the software
IMHO, I think that kids who want to program will learn to program. I mean, the kids who learned everything about their computer 10 years ago didn't do it because the tools were there. The computer was something that interested them and they soaked up all they could when they could. The same is still true.
That all said - I agree, some of the beginning tools are not there in the sense that you no longer have DOS with BASIC. But in another way, you have so much more. Now these kids have the internet to get all their tools. This is where I think the author or the article is missing something - free SDKs are being DLed, and the real wiz kids are learning how to program in much more robust languages than BASIC. Because of such, I really don't see a need for Toy Languages.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
When he turned 13, I gave him an old 486, a manual on BASIC, and told him how to find it on the windows directory. Didn't do anything else other than type up a few lines of simple code. Natural curiosity took over. Soon he was writing complicated and lengthy RPGs, similar to what came out in the '80s. Next summer I gave him an old C++ book some visual basic stuff, and some disks. The next summer Java. And now he is going to be applying to a college that offers computer science in the fall. He codes in his sleep now. Oh, this summer's project is to take some boxes, some Linux disks, and make a web server, firewall, and Linux server.
My thought is that if the kid has the normal curiosity then just give them the tools and they will figure it out. There are plenty of old books and software available on Ebay and used book stores.
I know VB is not the way to go for serious programming, but neither is basic. And you know what will turn off kids or even hardware enthusiasts that wannabe programmers most? Typing in a hello world program in C or C++ or whatever, and having it output in a fugly console window. There is no sense of accomplishment in that. Back in 1980, that was pretty cool. in 1990, that was acceptable. But if you want to ignite a spark in someone, that is not going to cut it today. There are free "Student" versions of VB that MS gives away, that doesnt allow you to make a .exe out of your program, you can just compile/run it on the fly from within the program. And if someone really wants to make an .exe out of it, they can acquire VS (acquire being a nice generic term). Playing with the gui window designer, and then putting code behind those buttons and text boxes will make the aspiring programmer feel like he is doing something cool, and then hopefully send him onto bigger and better things, and eventually different languages platfroms. typing gcc helloworld.cpp -o helloworld, and then having it print out "hello world" in a console box is NOT going to cut it. The goal is not to start out making them serious developers, the goal is to get them interested in programming so they want to become serious developers, and MS/VB perform that function well. You can write many cool applications in VB without alot of effort.
The only other alternative I can think of is a web based technology like ASP/JSP/PHP, but due to the fact that is difficult to get a decent host for a website on a budget of zero dollars that your friends can go to and say "cool!", I think that those technologies lose their novelty really fast. Plus the bar to entry is a little higher, since you have to understand the relationship between the pages and the webserver, as well as configure things correctly, which VB does not require. Apache/IIS can be a little intimidating at fist and after seeking help and getting a load of RTFM responses, said wannabe programmer will quickly give up and just go back to playing PS2.
since there was little budget for big iron we did lots with Linux (web pages, mail server, ftp server, dhcp, even a commercial student database called Schoolmaster) and the Library teacher told me about a young kid (then in the 7th grade) whose family couldn't get him a computer of his own. I took a 486/120 and installed Linux with no gui on it and we allowed kids to check it out like a library book. I included just the basics to get on... how to login, how to use Lynx, where to find more information, the "man" pages, etc.
As far as I know this 7th grader was the only student who checked out the box. I got a few questions relayed to me by the library teacher and answered them. I lost track of him until my son told me that he turned up at a County Fair at the "internet cafe" my son was running and he was heavily into Llinux!
Last month my contact at the school district told me that the kid, now a junior in HS, is planning a senior project: a Beowolf cluster! He is now trying to round up a few dozen machines to use in his cluster.
This is a small school system in a farming community and turns out only one really good natural engineer/computer scientist every 4 or 5 years but I like to think that my idea of creating a "library book" computer using Linux helped turn out this one.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Whatever happened to pascal?
Lo these many years ago, when I was in first year, pascal was used as the teaching language in many universities, including mine. It's nice enough as a sandbox language to help you learn good programming habits, yet powerful enough to do non-trivial things.
In fact you can download a free pascal compiler to play around with it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Game Maker URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/
I think we ought to harness those resources. We ought to use them to teach children those languages that are immensely powerful yet, judged by our standards, too inefficient to be practical. In particular, I'm referring to functional programming languages like Scheme and Haskell.
Now, hear me out.
Why functional programming languages? Because they lend themselves to extremely powerful, mathematical ways of thinking about and solving problems. Learning these ways of thinking when young will benefit our children for the rest of their lives. For example, take a look at the The TeachScheme! Project. I wish something like that was available when I was in High School.
Let us not teach our children the technologies of today but of tomorrow. More and more, I am convinced that functional programming, once considered too computationally inefficient for industry work, will be tomorrow's dominant programming paradigm. No other way of programming so readily lends itself to the formalism that is necessary to manage the ever-increasing complexity of modern software projects.
So, let us give our children the tools they will need to solve the problems of their day. Teach them functional programming.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Wouldn't it be easier to just install perl on the windows machine? Your technique is neither easy nor intuitive. And I can't imagine it being something that _most_ 12 year olds can do (I wouldn't let my 12 year old inside my pc).
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
No no no. The kid wants to do something productive and actually program, not get trapped into setting up a whole new system and get involved in patches and unrelated packages. All he has to do is get a hold of a free language package on the web like Tcl/Tk or Perl or even LISP and he's good to go with one download and a double-click. So why go through the trouble of all that for something so simple? Talk about overengineering the solution.
This is the problem with Slashdot readers: they automatically assume Linux=freeware. You know, freeware *does* exist for other systems. However, the author of the article didn't necessarily state that Windows was the system that was loaded on the theoretical 12 year old's target system.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Actually, given this scenario of enabling a kid to learn programming, I'd absolutely point them at Java.
I was one of those kids that learned programming in BASIC on TRS-80's back in the early 80's... and back then the order of the day was procedural programming, so that's the methodology that I learned. Because of my background in procedural, I have never gotten fully comfortable with OOP, and it's been the Achilles' tendon of my career.
OOP is significantly easier to learn if you don't have to 'unlearn' procedural programming first... so start there with the next generation of programmers. Java's got it's flaws, but for learning Object Oriented Programming, it's the way to go.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
Anyhow, back to the present...
Some kid found my 3D asteriods game on the internet and asked me if I could teach him how to program. Note that he lives in another state, and I've never met him in person.
He was 12 at the time and struck me as being bright. I had him download the free Java stuff from Sun and we developed a video game applet together. We discussed what kind of game to make, how it would work, and the logic behind it. We decided on a simple game and then added features as we went along, rather than trying to implement his initial vision all at once. This let him see that progress was being made.
We didn't get into any OO stuff. In fact the structure of the game is more similar to C than to traditional Java code, but it was stuff he could understand. He wrote some of it and modified much of what I wrote.
You can check out the result here
Here is what I learned from the project:
Lasers Controlled Games!
give them a game to play which sneakly teaches them to program.
There is no god
OO doesn't mean a scary IDE. OO doesn't mean VB.NET or any other language on the .NET object model.
:) Kids end up learning OO by manipulating actual objects, in the form of graphical "Morphs," giving them functionality, changing their properties... until the day it clicks, and they decide they want a totally new "kind" of Morph.
Smalltalk has been used for teaching kids for 30 years, and with a good amount of success.
Part of the reason kids can learn Smalltalk well is that there is no need to learn and use OO off the bat. You can do a fair amount of stuff in Smalltalk just by using Object-Based Programming, rather than OOP. Object-based means *using* objects, creating them, but without a full dose of creating classes, etc.
Now a days, we have Squeak, which takes it to the next level. Kids can get a big return on their investment of time, creating moving, colorful things, while writing a very small amount of code. Unlike some environments for beginners, it scales up, being useful for creating big and scary applications with a lot of code.
Check out the demos- it's open source, and runs on just about every platform worth runnning, including Mac OS Classic/X, Windows > 3.1 (incl WinCE), and all modern Unices under X11 (or DirectFB, Linux FB, SDL).
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
In fact I would say that even downloading Tcl/Tk or Perl could be overengineering the solution.
The truth is that the Perl environment for Windows is not always intuitive and can occasionally prompt windows errors which are relatively easily understood by someone with a lot of computing experience but can be intimidating to a fledgling coder.
What people have overlooked is that windows does come with a built in interpreter for at least one widely used language: Internet Explorer knows all about Java.
The best part is that the Web is an environment most twelve year old kids are already quite familiar with. You can teach them basic HTML (if they haven't picked it up already) and then get them started on using Javascript. Javascript on a web page has the same sort of instant gratification that I remember from making the screen on my vic20 flash red and proclaim that I was cooler than my sister. Once they are comfortable with Javascript you can move them on to writing full-feldged Java applets (of course all of this coding can be done in notepad (or your favorite syntax-highlighting text editor)). In this way they will learn about object oriented programming. If the kid gets a good handle on writing Java applets and is still interested, they are probabl ready to move onto real programming: teach them C, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Maybe even give them a Linux box.
It's a simple way to learn programming on a modern windows box without having to install any developers kits or worry about system calls etc., and it all works in an environment (the Web) with which kids are already familiar and interested in.
lysergically yours
When I started, it was with the Sinclair ZX-81 I had as a Christmas present.
Today, I don't think it's necessarily the lack of built-in languages (as others have pointed out - most OSes come with a language of some sort) but a lack of where-to-get-started.
The great thing about the ZX-81 is that it came with a manual. Not like a PC manual of today which tells you how to plug in the keyboard and monitor (the ZX-81 manual had this) - the ZX-81 manual also had instructions on programming things - from the basics of programming onwards. It taught you what variables were, what loops were, what if statements did. You got a starting point with the computer as soon as you unpacked it and plugged it in for the first time.
The BBC Microcomputer was the best - it had a built in 6502 assembler. (I also learned Z80 for the Spectrum I had after the ZX-81). Knowing asm made it a lot easier to learn C, especially pointers (which I've noticed time and time again newbies always struggle with).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I can't believe some of you are suggesting that an 8-10 year old child should be introduced to programming by way of C, C++, or Java. Are you kidding? Perhaps you've forgotten what it meant to be NEW to programming and don't realize that children are going to approach programming in a different way than a veteran will.
You've got to think about what's going to make sense for a kid. When I was a kid, if I wanted to print "Hello, world!" to the screen I typed in 'print "Hello, world!"'. That makes sense. Do you honestly think a kid just starting out is going to know what all the extra crap he has to declare just to print something in Java means? What the hell do you think "public static void main" means to a kid? How is he supposed to understand that if he wants to "print" he has to use System.out.println? Furthermore, is a kid just starting out supposed to know what static typing is? Give them a language where they can just declare variables. At least that way they can draw a simple parallel to pre-algebra (children understand "x = 5" in math class... they don't have to say "int x = 5" in a math problem, so why would it make sense right off the bat to do so in a computer program)? Do you think children are going to understand even the basic concepts of OO programming? There are undergrads in colleges across the world who are having a tough enough time with that.
I'm going to recommend Python. It's the modern-day QBasic (not meant in a bad way... Python is very powerful, I mean that it can boil programming down the essentials for novices in much the same way that QBasic did). No static typing, simple syntax, and you can program interactively. It's definitely the best thing going for introducting children to programming today.
no, it would be easier to install python.
you realy think an 8 year old can jump right into perl?
Basic was popular to learn on in the 80's becasue it was such a simple language...python is even better than basic and it enforces good programming techiques.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
you're average box does indeed come with a programming environment:
HTML and JavaScript (and any other web pluggable scripting)
they are even simpler than say, Python (although Python is definite a great first language) and they come bundled with your average browser...its also a good first lesson in platform dependencies, standards, and the do's and don'ts of implemeting those standards (no names will be mentioned here *cough* IE *cough*)
albeit they are narrow in scope and limited in features, but we're talking somthing to whet the newbies appetite right?
****--- A fortune cookie once told me the meaning of life...so I ate it. ---****
"I wouldn't let my 12 year old inside my pc"
I have to say you are way off base here.
The fact is that unless you let your 12 year old break/fix pc stuff, providing they show an interest in it, you are telling them not to be interested in science.
When I was 12, I was building clones from components, at 16 I was selling beige box's for a tidy profit. If my father had told me no when I wanted to see how the family machine worked, I would never have played with electronics very much.
Today itâ(TM)s so much easier. Just buy them a cheep ebay throw away, an you have nothing to worry about. They will learn more from an old DOS machine then the bloated XP box you probably run anyway.
and yet you'd let your 12 year old code in Perl? Aw, c'mon, show the poor little tyke some mercy and at least let him start with a structured and easy to learn language first.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
It was compulsory in our family when young to help dad repair cars. So yes, he did get me replacing alternators (relatively easy) or striping parts, cleaning and then re-assembling.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Java is nice in some ways, but I must disagree that its a learning language. I used to think along the same lines, but careful thought and argument has changed my mind (who would have thought that anyone's mind could change from the internet).
;) I guess the real question is, should we cater to (read: dumb down) the fringe?
To begin with, procedural programming isn't diametrically opposed to OO, like many like to imply. OO is, in part, a way to organize those procedures into coherent wholes. I don't think you can write a OO program without knowing how to write a procedure. When I was going through my basic undergraduate programming classes, many fellow students were having problems using iteration to do something to an entire array. Hopefully the foreach concept won't have too high a barrier of entry.
Now the above understanding is easy enough to rectify without abandoning Java. Simply begin teaching them the basics using the classic "static void main(String[] args)" line. This is the real problem with Java as a learning language: there's a lot that the student must be told to remember but not understand. The meaning of many keywords nessecary to program in Java can be overbearing to teach and mostly serves as a hurdle to student's interests. Exceptions are a nice way of handling errors, but they require a lot of confusing ideas to beginner programmers, like the notion of execution control flow, the activation record, and the keywords throws, try, and catch. There used to be a very classic line in introductory Java texts, for doing standard commandline input. Something like BufferedStream keyboard = new BufferedStream(System.in()). Again most students are just taught 'Just memorize it for now, we'll discuss (or replace) it later.'
That said, there are worse choices than Java for a language. If you can skirt around the issues I've mentioned above, Java does have many nice benefits. The exceptions have a very handy benefit compared to other compiled languages; rather than get a Segment Fault, you get something like NullPointerException(MyClass.java:40). And of course, the lack of explicit pointers itself is just one less concept you need to teach, especially when you're simply trying to cover the basics that are present in nearly every language in use. The Javadocs are also handy.
So really it isn't a clear cut yes or no. If the student is dead set on learning to program then perhaps Java is the way to go. But for students on the fringe, every boring hurdle to get something done is another step towards middle management.
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Open Source Sysadmin
How about, as it states they've already got windows, they just install the .NET framework (which is available on Windows Update)
NotePad to edit then just run the command compiler. Manual is available on MSDN (or you could download then entire SDK!).
Failing that download #Develop (www.icsharpcode.net) if you want an IDE.
I program professionally in Scheme, you insensitive clod!
(Seriously, I do.)
My experience - early 80s home computing in the UK
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Back in '83 my father bought the family a BBC B [1], and not long after playing the bundled games thoroughly I found the User Guide, tried out the teletext examples to do double height text, the moving man vdu23 example, and didn't stop until I got to the end. It was a wonderful learning experience..
Switch the Beeb on...
*blur*beep*
BBC Computer 32k
Basic
> 10 PRINT "Ooh look a programming language"
> 20 PRINT "that is right there at power up"
> 30 PRINT "and easy enough for a preteen"
> 40 GOTO 10
> RUN
From that prompt BBC BASIC was right there available to you from power up. Want to draw a triangle - plot 85.. play a middle C note - SOUND 1,-15,53,5. Now is that or talking to DirectX via C/C++/VB/Delphi/etc easier for a child?
Along with the Beeb, plenty other 8 bit machines also provided a simple to use programming environment right there by default at power up. No extras to have to buy, no alternative OS's to install, and what plenty of people who've posted here seem to be completely forgetting - a learning curve suitable for a pre-teen.
Nowadays
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I think the article is spot on. A child who sits down at an out of the box Windows PC can do nothing more than play Solitaire. Sure there is plenty that can be done if you know about it. This requires purchase of $50+ books, programming languages, or knowledge to wipe the system and install some Unix variant with an oss compiler, etc. These are out of reach for a child. Even if a knowing parent had sorted out one of these solutions, it is still have a steeper learning curve.
It's all about accessibility, and nowadays programming really is less accessible to young children. Anyone who can't see that either wasn't there in the 80s or lives in an alternative reality.
[1] Huge UK success. Never cracked US market. See here for some background history on it.
[2] For the BBC, Electron, etc there was Micro User, A&B Computing, Acorn User, Electron World, and others besides. The C64/128 had Crash, Zzap, etc, and for the Speccy there was Your Sinclair, and lots of others I've forgotten.
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There have been many, many "robot programming" games written for just about every platform. Some use their own mini languages, some use real world languages. Some, like Core Wars, are even portable and semi-standardized. As a category, these are definitely a great introduction to programming.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
When I was little, my dad got an Apple IIc. It came with a bunch of disks. The Apple at Work, The Apple at Play, Introduction, The Inside Story, Exploring Apple Logo, and Getting down to BASIC, among others. These were what got me into programming, particularly the "Getting down to BASIC" disk.
The two best things about the "Getting down to BASIC" tutorial were:
- It came with the computer, and I tried out everything that came with the computer.
- It was very, very, very friendly.
This is what we are lacking today. Something that most kids will discover on their own that gets them into programming, WITHOUT the influence of an adult in their life to suggest it.I think we need a well advertised website with a tutorial on it like the Getting Down to BASIC tutorial. A tutorial that you don't have to download or anything; the website has it's own interpreter.
Furthermore, for most of the tutorial you shouldn't even be using the real interpreter yet; in Getting Down to BASIC, most of the time the tutorial would type a line or two of code, and then ask you to finish one word or something. You weren't really in the BASIC interpreter at all. If you typed the wrong word, it would give you a fake error message and then explain in detail what you did wrong, and ask for another guess. If you made a common mistake, it had a response tailored for that. It also heaped congratulations on you when you did something right. Only near the end would you type in an entire line of code at once or maybe even a whole short program.
I think just telling kids to go use Python is way off. There's like a million steps in between "go learn Python" and writing Hello World. Among them are "download and install Python", "Run the interpreter", "figure out what an "interpreter" is ", "figure out what a "program" is", "find out how to quit out of the interpreter", "figure out why typing "i want you to put my name on the screen" doesn't work, even though i'm saying essentially the same thing as they are saying in the tutorial, overcome confusion and frustration when you say "Python" and the computer says
etc. With Getting Down to BASIC, all you had to do was put in a disk and follow the instructions. Almost anyone who could read could do it. This is what we need. For example, I think that when you are at the tutorial website and you get to the point where you type "Python", the computer should reply something more like this:
)When I was young, about in 3rd grade, I ran across my first book on computer programing in the school library... naturally it was a neat little colorfully illustrated book on the BASIC programming language. Unfortunately my family didn't have a computer at home at the time, but there isn't much syntax to the language anyway, and I ate the book up like candy. I actually sat down and wrote out all sorts of programs on our word-processor (fancy typewriters that used to be big but died out as computer prices came down) which I could never run.
Oh how I longed only to try my programs for real! But none of my friends who HAD computers knew anything about where to go in the system to look for a place that would accept input in BASIC. They probably had GWBASIC on there somewhere, but they certainly didn't know it. I actually remember the first time I got to run a program... it was in a toy store that was selling one of those "Kid's computer" type toys and it was on display. It said it could be programmed, so I went up and typed:
PRINT "What's your name?"
INPUT $NAME
PRINT "Hello, "; $NAME; "!"
I can't begin to express how pleased I was to see "Hello, Shon!" appear on the screen just as I expected it to.
We finally got our first personal computer in 1994, but it wasn't for a long time that I realized that, buried deep in a directory, was a program called QBASIC, which I eventually had quite a run with.
This brings me to the question: As I've seen new computers ship over the years without even QBASIC on them, I feel bad for all those kids who'd like to try to program, but don't know how. Sure we have the internet now, but downloading something like GCC is probably a bit much to ask for a 3rd grader who's never used anything but Windows. I really think that Microsoft should create a Windows GUI version of QBASIC and include it in the start menu just to encourage kids to play around with it. Barring that, OS's like MacOS and Linux that include C/C++ compilers win lots of points in my book. One other thing that I think that has especially helped get kids interested in programming is making Web pages... they see a cool thing on some other page and they wanna learn how to do it. Java's pretty complex for most kids, but there's a huge incentive in that it takes relatively little effort to do something that will really impress your friends, while it can seem like languages like C/C++ let you do nothing but output text.
So yes, I think that all OS's should include some sort of compiler with a GUI as a basic part of the operating system. If a basic paint program and writing program are worth including, then a basic compiler is definitely worth including as well. Lots of kids are interested in programming a computer at some level, but have no idea where to start.