Revisiting Why Johnny Can't Code: Have We "Made the Print Too Small"?

theodp writes: In What is Computer Science?, the kickoff video for Facebook's new TechPrep diversity initiative, FB product manager Adriel Frederick explains how he was hooked-on-coding after seeing the magic of a BASIC PRINT statement. His simple BASIC example is a nice contrast to the more complicated JavaScript and Ruby examples that were chosen to illustrate Mark Zuckerberg's what-is-coding video for schoolkids. In How to Teach Your Baby to Read, the authors explain, "It is safe to say that in particular very young children can read, provided that, in the beginning, you make the print very big." So, is introducing coding to schoolkids with modern programming languages instead of something like BASIC (2006) or even (gasp!) spreadsheets (2002) the coding equivalent of "making the print too small" for a child to see and understand?

Comments

BASIC

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Re:BASIC

[BarbaraHudson]

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Knock it all you want, but it's simply not true. And it wasn't true 30 years ago either. One of the lessons BASIC teaches is that you better be rigorous about what you type in - even a small error will screw you. Especially the buggy code that actually runs but doesn't do what you think it does.

The "B" in BASIC stands for "Beginners" for a reason. It was never supposed to be the be-all and end-all of languages, just a way to get your feet wet (and addicted) to making a computer do what we tell it to.

Re: Basic logic and flow control

[bill_mcgonigle]

Lightbot is the phone app version of this. My boy loves it - it's roughly LOGO for 2015, and he's working on subroutines that call other subroutines now. Except he doesn't know that (we did basic IO and loops, verbally with pseudocode, on a long car ride prior to getting Lightbot). It's more fun than the VIC-20 assembly that was my only option at his age.

Academic: does this theoretical problem exist?
Market: download the free app.

Re:Dice,

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you, Mark?

Re:Dice,

[ShanghaiBill]

Please stop shilling for Facebook.

The point made in the summary is stupid, so it is not effective shilling anyway. It was written by someone who has no idea what is actually happening in the schools. I am involved in teaching elementary school kids programming. None of the schools that I know of are starting with Ruby, or Python, or Java, or any other language being criticizing. They all use Scratch, which is a much better introduction to programming than BASIC.

The high schools tend to use Java, because that is what the AP-CS test uses, but high school students can handle small print.

Re:One interesting thing he can do

[sycodon]

Actually, he can't edit a fucking comment once posted.