3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
6:27 p.m.
On Tue, 3 Jan 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
A real programmer cana write a FORTRAN program in any language.
I bet that, with only a few dozen lines of machine code (to call INT13h),
that I could even write a disk format conversion program in 1981 BASICA!
Without ANYthing outside the BASIC, thanks to the built-in sector I/O, I
could write a program to read model 3 diskettes on a Coco.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
There is a core question here which you seem to be
skipping over. Do
you want to teach people to write code, to be able to make a computer
perform new tasks? *Or* do you want to train professional software
engineers? These are not at /all/ the same thing. Indeed I'd submit
that they are barely related.
I want to teach them enough about what programming IS, that THEY can
select what language they want to use.
If you want the latter, then sure, yes, Scheme or Lisp
or something
clever and rather arcane. Start 'em on the hard stuff so they learn
right,
Therefore, the very first time that they drive a car, it should be manual
transmission, manual choke, manual spark advance?, hand crank? Sure, they
should learn the hard stuff; but howzbout let them learn enough in the
auto-everything car to drive around the block first, THEN get into it.
So in fact BASIC did /not/ give you brain damage and
stop you learning?
did for me
I may NEVER be able to become a decent programmer.
You have shown that you don't actually understand
how much BASIC moved
on from the crappy MS BASIC 4 days of 1980.
That's about when MBASIC 5.1
replace 4.51.
CBASIC (Gordon Eubanks) was going fast.
By then almost everything had 64K of RAM.
Kids being
educated for a career in software starting today deserve
something better than BASIC. Things are bad enough already.
They deserve something
better than a 1970s BASIC, sure... But even a
late 1980s BASIC would, I submit, be more use than Python or Ruby,
which are too big, too complex and too abstract.