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David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids
An anonymous reader writes "David Brin is an award-winning science fiction writer who has often written on social issues such as privacy and creativity. Now, he's written an essay for Salon.com titled 'Why Johnny Can't Code'. He discusses his son's years-long effort to find a way to use his math book's BASIC programming examples. All they were ever able to find, however, were either children's versions (on the Mac) or 'advanced' versions which attempted to support modern programming requirements (and which required constant review of the user's manual). Ultimately, they ended-up buying an old Commodore 64 on Ebay — Yes, for those of you under the age of 30, 'personal' computers like the Apple II and C64 used to all include BASIC in their ROMs."
How about QBasic on Win95, MS DOS, etc? My first BASIC programming experiences were on one of those kiddy VTech laptops, then moved to QBasic on Win95. Worked great... simple BASIC, didn't require any special knowledge. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.
... maybe he'd code up a "dupe detector" for the /. editors to use?
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I mean, if I had kids, the first thing I'd do is program 'em to get up and get me a beer from the fridge. Good fer nothin' brats.
It does afford me the option of wondering "aloud" why Brin didn't just download, say, an Apple ][ or C64 emulator. I mean, I always thought the guy was kind of smart, but now I know it's not true. (And don't tell me that non-computer nerds wouldn't know about emulators; if you don't know, ask someone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know that /. is famous for dupes, but at some point I start thinking the editors are playing a little joke on us.
Why pay for the cow when you can get the emulator for free?
Slashdot can post dupe stories about the dearth of programming training opportunities for kids, but they can reject a story I posted about a recent study showing a LACK of programming jobs?
Why should kids learn programming when they'll only be able to compete for a programming job if they take an East Indian's dollar-a-week salary?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
What about the Lego Mindsorm? That has a programming language. I'll bet it is way cooler to use a beginners programming language to build robots, than it was to draw boxes, or calculate your homework.
...and hold on, now! Where's my damn flying car?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
It was way, way, WAY too limiting and tedious, even for my neophyte 13-year-old self.
I really didn't discover the joy of programming until I discovered Turbo Pascal. It was like somebody unshackling me - even with the crappy PC XT CGA graphics.
Pascal is a *great* learning language. It teaches all the good habits that will be needed for a C/C++/Perl hacker later in life, without all the administrivia involved with C, or the sheer horsepower (with all the syntactic complexity) of Perl.
Go with Pascal as a first language, and you can't go wrong.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Welcome back to Slashdot - we missed you yesterday... http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 9/14/0320238
Surely it ought to be:
... or something similar, unless you're on BBC BASIC of course - just about the only 8-bit BASIC with real structure to it
10 LET ZONK = 1
20 LET EDITOR = 1
30 IF (EDITOR = ZONK) THEN GOSUB 1000
40 GOTO 30
1000 REM DUPE POST
1010 RETURN
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
A boy who searches for years to find a program that will let him do some examples from his maths book. He is like the /. King. We must find him and make him our saviour, he will lead us to victory over these so called "norms"
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, no! This is a dupe story, you're not going to catch me posting again.
Oh, wait, shit!
KFG
Next up: Why Zonk Can't Edit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
perl -we 'print "Big Tits" until 1==0' Is the epitomy of every first program.
Perl seems to fit the bill, since it can be as simple as you want and doesn't even have the type issues Basic has. Perl is happy to be procedural. When you are ready to step up to objectsperl is ready.
Object oriented perl is a wonderful way to learn objects. Wait don't scream. I said "learn". I'd been object oriented programming for years in Java and other languages. But I truly did not understand how all the pieces worked till I wrote perl objects. In perl it's like one of those "visible man" models. You learn how inheritance works. You learn how binding of an instance to a class works. You understand closures for the first time. You understand how the namespaces are kept separate and how instance memory is allocated. It's not just some voodoo that simply works, like in JAVA. Moreover all of the voodoo is not out of reach but right there for you to mess with. An instance can change it's own inheritance if you want it to. An instance can create a new method and write it into it's own namespace if it wants to. An instance can trap calls to it's own methods and redirect them or intercept calls to methods that don't exist and respond to them.
Those features are not unique to perl (for example pyhton implements objects identically to perl). The difference is that All of that object management occurs in perl itself and is not hidden behind syntactic sugar (like python and java). You quickly appreciate what dereferencing costs, etc...
The other thing that is nice about perl for learning is all of those prefixes like $ @, and so forth. They may make perl look like cursing but they force you to think about what a variable is. When I index out an array, I get what? an array? no I get a scalar, so $X[2] is how I index @X. You can look at someones perl program and if it's written well tell what every word is. You cannot look at a bare name in python or java and tell if it's a method, an array, a hash, a scalar or reference. Perl you can. (Oh and by the way let me explode a perl/pyhton myth. python has more special markup characters in use than perl, the main difference is that in python they are suffixes instead of prefixes and are overloaded with multiple meanings--try counting how many modifiers there are some time (e.g. () , [] ** and so on))
Now once you learn perl objects. Well it's time to put down the perl and back away slowly. Python, java are much better languages for writing re-usable, easily read, complex object oriented programs. Perl is still a much more powerful language than either. But it's powerful for efficiently creating compact or single use programs quickly. Not for well designed complex systems.
Perl is good language to start in, plus it's useful enough to work throughout your career. Basic is not.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
10 Post news item
20 goto 10
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
You know what's even funnier? The link I created in the Parent works! And it takes you to the /. home page! hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Good lord man. Why go through all that trouble?
The article should be called Why Johnny Can't Freaking Use Google.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I don't think the antiquification of DOS, and of all things, BASIC, is going to have some negative effect.
We'll always have to suffer the hand-wringing from a generation getting older, and I'll always roll my eyes about it.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Kids that grow up to learn Python are more presentable and well mannered that those that grow up to learn Perl. Flame On!
I too have lamented the changes in IT. When I first learned to program (1977 on an HP-25), the technical environment was very different. Back then, everyone who wanted to use a computer HAD to know how to program. The scarcity of software meant that everyone wrote their own code or, at least, typed in code from a magazine. Very limited software sharing schemes and the inability to quickly find software meant it was easier to write your own than to find someone else's software. Simple languages, simple hardware, simple interfaces, and simple APIs ruled. When the entire OS plus application suite resided in a few k of RAM, it was easy to both work with the system or create your own. It took very little effort for a novice programmer to produce world-class code because the bar was so low and the functionality so primitive that anyone could make something interesting. In the old days, everyone grew their own code.
Today it's all different. The OS has become a beast that not even a team of programmers can fully comprehend. IDEs, OOP, and layered architectures try to hide the complexity, but its still there. Moreover, almost any bit of code or application that one might want has a multiple incarnations ready for buying/downloading from commercial/shareware/OSS sources. It's now very easy to find the application you want and much harder to write something that is better than anythign else. In the new days, few grow their own code.
Perhaps its like the change from a subsistence-agrarian world to a world of craftsmen (or industry) where programming is like farming. In the past, everyone grew their own code. Today, no one grows their own food and farming is a very minor part of the global economy. Farmers may lament that most children in the city don't know how to milk a cow or thresh wheat, but perhaps those skills aren't needed in most people. Just as one farmer can now feed some 40 people, one programmer servers the programming needs of a growing number of users. Consider that Microsoft as 60,000 employees whose code runs on at least 600 million operating PCs -- more than 10,000 non-programming users per programmer.
As with farming, we now live in a world where few need to grow their own code. As far as schools are concerned we may be entering a world in which fewer than 1 child per class will ever need to know how to program. That makes me sad at some level, I truly enjoyed learning to program, but it may be an inevitable part of the maturation process for IT and the internet.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
http://blassic.org/
Nor does it seem to be open source - so low poosibility of porting it.
God that is sooo 90s.
I'd reccomend Python."Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
I started out on a C64/C128 as well. Basic is not a good first language.
Frankly, if I wanted to teach my child programming, I'd start with javascript. Here's why:
- It's extremely easy to get started in. You can do a lot with one-liners, and unlike perl you can explain the one-liners to a neophyte. There are many excellent beginner's books.
- On-screen graphical feedback is instantaneous, and you don't have to restrict yourself to console output.
- Every single web-enabled PC has the development tools right there. They don't have to do complicated installs, and they can show off their 1337 skills on their friend's computer.
- And best of all, if you give them a simple hosting account they can place their javascript programs online for all their friends to see.
That's a point I hadn't thought to make last time this story came around. I started programming on a Commodore64 when I was 7. Not a prodigy; I programmed about as well as you'd expect a 7 year old to program. Copied short snippets from books and whatnot. By ten, I was using basic programming flow to draw interesting patterns on the screen. At the age of thirteen, I tried my first truly ambitious project: a 'Dragon Warrior'-style RPG.
It was a catastrophe. When I first started composing this, I was going to blame it on BASIC itself, then on the crappy line editor I was trying to use. But as frustrating as these things were, my greatest shortcoming was that I had no adult supervision. When you try and teach yourself, rather than learning from an expert, you tend to not realize when you've missed something very, very important.
I feel a deep sense of shame even today for admitting this level of stupidity, but I didn't know what a subroutine was. Knowing that I could have called the same snippet of code from different parts of the program would have saved me much heartache, but I had the concept of a flowchart firmly in my head, and it seemed to demand a single, unbroken flow of execution. Which demanded cut-n-paste. Which I couldn't do with that crappy line editor.
Thinking on it, I should probably try tackling that project again, so that next time I set down to writing a long anti-BASIC diatribe, I'll at least know what the hell I'm talking about.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Actually, I learned PHP 3 years ago... I was 13, and it's actually a good way to learn programming syntax without without having to learn about writing classes, methods/functions, etc right from the start, but still learning some basic OOP (writing your own functions and using them). Now I'm learning Delphi(I realize that the syntax is totally different) & Java, but PHP was a good way for me to get into programming... plus it makes me some cash.
Regards, Brad Williams
In perl there are references. A reference is created by \ on a container.or you can create a reference with anonymous array and/or hash syntax.A reference can have a namespace associated with it. This is done with bless(). Such a blessed reference is called an "object".Subroutines can be written to work on objects. They expect their first parameter to be the object being worked on. Subroutines that expect an object as their first parameter are called "methods". Often this parameter, by convention, is named $self.If you use an '->' between an object variable and a subroutine then the parser rewrites this to provide the object as the first argument to the subroutine.A method call is first searched for in the package the object is blessed into. If it is not found there the package's @ISA array is examined. Each namespace in the @ISA array is searched (while in turn any @ISA's in that namespace is searched if the method is not located in the namespace) until the first method is found or none is.
That's it. Everything else you can put together from general OO techniques.
Here's a small Point class. _init() is seperated from new() so that any sub-classes of Point (those packages that have a @ISA list with 'Point' as an element) can override it without having to rewrite new(). Alternately a sub-class could do some additional work and call $self->SUPER::_init(...) to call _init() in some super class.
If I wanted to tech my child programming, I'd start with Scheme. Here's why:
- I hate loops
- I hate variables
- I hate kids
Yeah, seriously I'd avoid teaching kids PERL. One problem basic DID have is it taught a few bad habits (Goto's, bad variable nameing , etc). Perl unfortunately in its quest for "More than one way to skin a cat", allows some shocking codeing, and unfortunately my eternal grip with perl, is it begets shocking code. "Hey , you have a language that lets you do cool stuff like closures and stuff (I think?) and you are using fucking $_@ variables and using regex's to traverse DOM trees. STOP PROGRAMMING, YOUR NOT GOOD AT IT!". ehh.
Python I thinks the clear choice. Its simple minded enough to teach to children (Kids, its all about hash's , lists and atoms), but is actually a real world language that allows some pretty fancy and efficient and READABLE stuff. It might not have the same eseoteric-beard status as lisp or scheme, but its a pretty damn nice language regardless, and you can actually get jobs codeing in it. And later on they can learn perl, once they've learned not to abuse perl.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.