Why Can't We Put a BASIC On the Phone?

theodp writes "In the Sixties, we could put a man on the moon. Nowadays, laments jocastette, America's tech giants can't even put a BASIC on the phone. Woz managed to crank out a BASIC interpreter for the 6502 in the '70s. As did Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So, why — at a time when development has never been easier — can't Google, Apple, and Microsoft manage to support a free BASIC or other programming-for-the-masses development environment on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones?" My limited experience with Android development showed using Java to be obtuse and downright obnoxious to do anything (at least without Eclipse, and even with it doing anything non-standard required digging through horrendous ant buildfiles). And, of course, without a REPL things were even more obnoxious. There is the android-scripting project, but it doesn't provide particularly exhaustive access to the platform.

Comments

Why would they want to?

[J'raxis]

The purpose of these devices is to make people stop thinking of computers as computers, and as mere appliances that do for you only what their manufacturers want them to do.

Sounds like a not so smart programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing is not liking a language ... for whatever reason, another is not having the skills to work on a pure object oriented language like Java.

The fact that the author is wanting to go back to such a poor, highly limited language as BASIC shows that he does not have what it takes to do real world programing.

Re:Why BASIC? What for?

[oakgrove]

It teaches them the fun side of programming,

Yeah and getting a paycheck is the fun side of working a job. Should we hand kids 20 dollar bills and pretend we are teaching them a work ethic? Dragging and dropping generic blocks of code outlives its pedagogical usefulness in about 20 minutes with a kid smart enough that he'll ever be a programmer anyway. Not to mention the fact that dragging and dropping a GUI is actually one of the boringest parts of programming. Coming up with the clever algorithm to solve a problem is what is fun and touchdevelop will never teach that. Basic would be much better and python would be infinitely better than that as it is a programming language that they might actually see one day and it is brain dead easy to boot.