Comment by biotech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biotech | Hacker News Reader

As much as I dislike Basic in all of its forms, I have to agree with the author on this: it's a good way for Kids to learn programming. My agreement is partially based on my own experience: When I was 13, I wanted to learn how to program my 386 computer. I tried, and failed, to teach myself C++. I then bought a book on QBasic, and learned it. Afterwards I went back to C++ (well, mostly the C subset of C++ actually). I eventually had to come back to Basic in the form of Visual Basic, but by the time that happened, I was an adult and already familiar with several different languages.

At some point, my dislike for Basic brought me to the question: "What language is appropriate to use for introducing kids to programming?" Of all of the other languages I know, none seem appropriate. (And yes, people have suggested Python, but I'm not convinced.) Languages designed for children are dumbed down. Languages designed to meet the rigor of modern programming requirements have complexities that should be hidden for relatively simple operations. Sigh. I'm sure there is a better way out there, but to find it within the haystack that is the collection of modern programming languages is a formidable task.

I am curious as to what you think basic does easier than python. Is it the significant whitespace? I just don't see how python is harder than basic in terms of what a beginning programmer is likely to do with it. They both have for loops and if statements which make up the lions share of the easy programs.

I would think it is easier to program in python because of the for each syntax in python since it maps so closely to human language. For element in list: do something with that element. To open up a file it's just myopenfile = open("/path/to/file") etc....

Line numbers. My father was a computer science teacher, and when I was very young (5, or 6), I used to look at the example programs that his students had written, and that he was grading at home. The exercises were were written in Pascal, and I just really had trouble grokking how the computer knew in which order to execute things. Even just the simple question of being able to identify where execution was going to start was a non-trivial exercise.

Line number based BASIC is much easier for a child to understand. You start at the top, and start reading. I remember that in my head I had an image of me writing 'stories' for the computer to read.

A (very) few years later, the question of order of execution was obvious to me, but I clearly remember those times in the lounge room looking at print outs of Pascal, and not being able to figure out what the program was going to do.

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