Slashdot Log In
David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 15, 2006 03:33 PM
from the watch-johnny-run-run-johnny-run dept.
from the watch-johnny-run-run-johnny-run dept.
An anonymous reader writes "David Brin is an award-winning science fiction writer who has often written on social issues such as privacy and creativity. Now, he's written an essay for Salon.com titled 'Why Johnny Can't Code'. He discusses his son's years-long effort to find a way to use his math book's BASIC programming examples. All they were ever able to find, however, were either children's versions (on the Mac) or 'advanced' versions which attempted to support modern programming requirements (and which required constant review of the user's manual). Ultimately, they ended-up buying an old Commodore 64 on Ebay — Yes, for those of you under the age of 30, 'personal' computers like the Apple II and C64 used to all include BASIC in their ROMs."
Related Stories
[+]
Your Rights Online: David Brin on Privacy 365 comments
David Brin is interviewed and provides some strong words on modern conceptions of privacy and why they're off-base. Brin asserts - and argues well - that a land with little privacy is a freer land.
[+]
Slashback: IceWeasel, Online Gambling, GPU Folding, Evolution 214 comments
Slashback tonight brings some clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including: The facts about Debian Iceweasel; A closer look at Folding@home's GPU client; David Brin's lament; Online gambling ban may violate international law; Human species may do whatnow?; and Another RIAA lawsuit dropped. Read on for details.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
There are options (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:There are options (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds very much made up to write an article.
Having said that, I have tried to find kid's programming books for my 8-year-old daughter. I started learning computer programming at 8 using my Commodore VIC-20 manual. It had a little cartoon computer character that led you through BASIC programming from the typical 10 PRINT "TIM" 20 GOTO 10 all the way to "advanced" games. As a kid, I absolutely loved it.
However, I have been able to find *nothing* like that for her... Any thoughts out there?
Parent
Welcome back to Slashdot - we missed you yesterday (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I really learned to program on an HP calculator. I had previously done some C, but the simple metaphor of the stack was alluring.
First Big Tits Dupe (Score:5, Interesting)
Perl seems to fit the bill, since it can be as simple as you want and doesn't even have the type issues Basic has. Perl is happy to be procedural. When you are ready to step up to objectsperl is ready.
Object oriented perl is a wonderful way to learn objects. Wait don't scream. I said "learn". I'd been object oriented programming for years in Java and other languages. But I truly did not understand how all the pieces worked till I wrote perl objects. In perl it's like one of those "visible man" models. You learn how inheritance works. You learn how binding of an instance to a class works. You understand closures for the first time. You understand how the namespaces are kept separate and how instance memory is allocated. It's not just some voodoo that simply works, like in JAVA. Moreover all of the voodoo is not out of reach but right there for you to mess with. An instance can change it's own inheritance if you want it to. An instance can create a new method and write it into it's own namespace if it wants to. An instance can trap calls to it's own methods and redirect them or intercept calls to methods that don't exist and respond to them.
Those features are not unique to perl (for example pyhton implements objects identically to perl). The difference is that All of that object management occurs in perl itself and is not hidden behind syntactic sugar (like python and java). You quickly appreciate what dereferencing costs, etc...
The other thing that is nice about perl for learning is all of those prefixes like $ @, and so forth. They may make perl look like cursing but they force you to think about what a variable is. When I index out an array, I get what? an array? no I get a scalar, so $X[2] is how I index @X. You can look at someones perl program and if it's written well tell what every word is. You cannot look at a bare name in python or java and tell if it's a method, an array, a hash, a scalar or reference. Perl you can. (Oh and by the way let me explode a perl/pyhton myth. python has more special markup characters in use than perl, the main difference is that in python they are suffixes instead of prefixes and are overloaded with multiple meanings--try counting how many modifiers there are some time (e.g. () , [] ** and so on))
Now once you learn perl objects. Well it's time to put down the perl and back away slowly. Python, java are much better languages for writing re-usable, easily read, complex object oriented programs. Perl is still a much more powerful language than either. But it's powerful for efficiently creating compact or single use programs quickly. Not for well designed complex systems.
Perl is good language to start in, plus it's useful enough to work throughout your career. Basic is not.
Parent
Re:There are options (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:There are options (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
If Johnny could code... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, really. (Score:4, Funny)
You know, though this is a dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know, though this is a dupe (Score:4, Insightful)
The article was interesting, but ultimately the author seemed to be concerned about recreating nostalgia for programming on his 8-bit computer rather than actually wanting kids to know how to program. There's countless examples of programming languages suitable for a kid. Bash, Excel, and Javascript are all pretty simple, don't require complex steps like compiling or memory management, and readily accessible.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. Actually you could get BASIC in ROM for the IBM PC-1... but alas, my machine lacked that option, and I ended up scrapping everything but the motherboard which AFAIK is still hanging on a
Come on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, hello? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lego Mindstorm? (Score:4, Informative)
Umm... (Score:5, Informative)
Despite the Dupe - I *Hated* BASIC; PASCAL Baby! (Score:5, Insightful)
It was way, way, WAY too limiting and tedious, even for my neophyte 13-year-old self.
I really didn't discover the joy of programming until I discovered Turbo Pascal. It was like somebody unshackling me - even with the crappy PC XT CGA graphics.
Pascal is a *great* learning language. It teaches all the good habits that will be needed for a C/C++/Perl hacker later in life, without all the administrivia involved with C, or the sheer horsepower (with all the syntactic complexity) of Perl.
Go with Pascal as a first language, and you can't go wrong.
DG
Re:Despite the Dupe - I *Hated* BASIC; PASCAL Baby (Score:5, Insightful)
I started out on a C64/C128 as well. Basic is not a good first language.
Frankly, if I wanted to teach my child programming, I'd start with javascript. Here's why:
- It's extremely easy to get started in. You can do a lot with one-liners, and unlike perl you can explain the one-liners to a neophyte. There are many excellent beginner's books.
- On-screen graphical feedback is instantaneous, and you don't have to restrict yourself to console output.
- Every single web-enabled PC has the development tools right there. They don't have to do complicated installs, and they can show off their 1337 skills on their friend's computer.
- And best of all, if you give them a simple hosting account they can place their javascript programs online for all their friends to see.
Parent
Re:Despite the Dupe - I *Hated* BASIC; PASCAL Baby (Score:4, Funny)
- I hate loops
- I hate variables
- I hate kids
Parent
Changing World: Low % Who Grow Their Own Code (Score:5, Insightful)
Today it's all different. The OS has become a beast that not even a team of programmers can fully comprehend. IDEs, OOP, and layered architectures try to hide the complexity, but its still there. Moreover, almost any bit of code or application that one might want has a multiple incarnations ready for buying/downloading from commercial/shareware/OSS sources. It's now very easy to find the application you want and much harder to write something that is better than anythign else. In the new days, few grow their own code.
Perhaps its like the change from a subsistence-agrarian world to a world of craftsmen (or industry) where programming is like farming. In the past, everyone grew their own code. Today, no one grows their own food and farming is a very minor part of the global economy. Farmers may lament that most children in the city don't know how to milk a cow or thresh wheat, but perhaps those skills aren't needed in most people. Just as one farmer can now feed some 40 people, one programmer servers the programming needs of a growing number of users. Consider that Microsoft as 60,000 employees whose code runs on at least 600 million operating PCs -- more than 10,000 non-programming users per programmer.
As with farming, we now live in a world where few need to grow their own code. As far as schools are concerned we may be entering a world in which fewer than 1 child per class will ever need to know how to program. That makes me sad at some level, I truly enjoyed learning to program, but it may be an inevitable part of the maturation process for IT and the internet.
Get with the vibe, dude (Score:3, Funny)
10 LET ZONK = 1
20 LET EDITOR = 1
30 IF (EDITOR = ZONK) THEN GOSUB 1000
40 GOTO 30
1000 REM DUPE POST
1010 RETURN
Simon
Correction (Score:4, Funny)
20 goto 10
Parent
http://dups.slashdot.org/ (Score:3, Interesting)
Flame Baby Flame (Score:5, Funny)
Parent