David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids

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."

10 Print "This news really sucks!"

[Anonymous Coward]

20 goto10

If Johnny could code...

[psykocrime]

... maybe he'd code up a "dupe detector" for the /. editors to use?

Yeah, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if I had kids, the first thing I'd do is program 'em to get up and get me a beer from the fridge. Good fer nothin' brats.

Welcome back to Slashdot - we missed you yesterday

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Welcome back to Slashdot - we missed you yesterday... http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/0 9/14/0320238 [slashdot.org]

Get with the vibe, dude

[Space cowboy]

Surely it ought to be:

10 LET ZONK = 1
20 LET EDITOR = 1
30 IF (EDITOR = ZONK) THEN GOSUB 1000
40 GOTO 30
1000 REM DUPE POST
1010 RETURN ... or something similar, unless you're on BBC BASIC [slashdot.org] of course - just about the only 8-bit BASIC with real structure to it

Simon

Yeh...

[ijakings]

A boy who searches for years to find a program that will let him do some examples from his maths book. He is like the /. King. We must find him and make him our saviour, he will lead us to victory over these so called "norms"

Re:One word...

[kfg]

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, no! This is a dupe story, you're not going to catch me posting again.

Oh, wait, shit!

KFG

Re:GG

[larry bagina]

Next up: Why Zonk Can't Edit.

Correction

[PFI_Optix]

10 Post news item
20 goto 10

A c64 from eBay?

[Weaselmancer]

Good lord man. Why go through all that trouble? [viceteam.org]

The article should be called Why Johnny Can't Freaking Use Google.

Flame Baby Flame

[neonprimetime]

Kids that grow up to learn Python are more presentable and well mannered that those that grow up to learn Perl. Flame On!

Windows only

[JoeCommodore]

Nor does it seem to be open source - so low poosibility of porting it.

God that is sooo 90s.

I'd reccomend Python.

Re:Despite the Dupe - I *Hated* BASIC; PASCAL Baby

[Bastian]

If I wanted to tech my child programming, I'd start with Scheme. Here's why:
- I hate loops
- I hate variables
- I hate kids

Re:There are options

[sg_oneill]

There also was "Alice", a python / 3d environment to teach kids object oriented coding. Python is of course a perfect first language for *anyone* as well.

However, its a crying shame that a good solid programming language, perhaps with game making potential or some other hook for kids, isnt included with every copy of windows.

Oh yeah old school basic for Windows: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/#5 [nicholson.com]

Its really really old school however.

Re:There are options

[xrayspx]

20 GOTO 10 isn't going anywhere.

Sure it is.