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Comment by sferik | Hacker News Reader

I've always believed the biggest single moment of destruction of future programmers is when Microsoft stopped shipping BASIC (plus the full source code of the games GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS) with DOS/Windows.

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I loved Gorillas. But Windows ships with .NET, including a C# and VB.Net compiler. I'd rather have hacked on that than BASIC, nostalgia value notwithstanding.

Now yes - as I much prefer Ruby, C++ and a wee bit of Haskell these days. But to learn? Absolutely not. The beauty of BASIC was that everything was simple enough that a 10 year old kid could comprehend it: type in instructions, and run them. No compilers, no CLR, no API calls. All of those things make the barrier to entry too high.

I started out writing things like:

  10 PRINT "Jason"
  20 GOTO 10

The reason why that's so important is that it can be comprehended, and it provides a base to which more knowledge can be added in very small pieces. Once the hypothetical 10-year-old has grasped the above - and there are a few fundamental concepts to grasp in there, they can start adding to that. Say:

  10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
  20 PRINT "Jason"
  30 NEXT

And from there, it's just a matter of learning more and more until you're dealing with abstract syntax trees, NP-hard problems, functional languages, multi-threaded programming and whatever else we get to deal with.

But if that first step is too high, many people will never be able to climb it.

That's exactly how I learned to program.

Absolutely. I tried teaching Python to teenagers. It turns out that significant whitespace is a hurdle. I would use QBasic if I had to do it again.

That's true, but these days most people have always-on broadband internet connections, so prebundling with windows is not as important as it once was.

I don't think something like Processing is any harder to get into than basic was. I started programming with GW-BASIC, LOGO and QBasic myself - the first thing that I thought when I started playing around with Processing is that it is remarkably similar to a modern QBasic.

As far as I know, Windows does not ship with the C# or VB.NET compiler. Both are, however, freely available as part of various downloadable SDKs and their respective Visual Studio Express SKUs.

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