Democratic Underground - Why Johnny Can't Code

I was exactly that 12-year-old kid who got hooked on programming starting with BASIC, on our Apple-II computer. I question whether BASIC is necessarily the only option here. For instance, Java's development environment is a free download, and you don't have to climb a huge learning curve to write your first "hello-world" Java program. But there was a definite simplicity to accessing BASIC on the old-school machines.

(you can read the rest of the article without a Salon subscription, via an ad click-thru)

Sept. 14, 2006 | For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/

Why Johnny Can't Code [View All]