Teaching Programming with BASIC
Teaching Programming with BASIC
I started programming in GW-BASIC on an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS. Back then, many so-called home and business computers came bundled with a BASIC interpreter, mostly made by or licensed from Microsoft. They all looked similar. You were greeted by a screen with a READY or OK prompt and a blinking ...
If not for the BASIC examples in the old 3-2-1 contact kids magazines that I discovered worked on my elementary schools Apple II computers and then later QBASIC, I have no idea what I would be doing in life.
That was my gateway to a greater interest in computers and an eventual job in IT. And. I will always respect BASIC for it.
10 PRINT "upvoted"
20 GOTO 10
Hey no botting!
NEW
This is my childhood! That and Logo Writer were the gateway to my future.
I worked with a buddy; one of us would read from the code listing in the magazine and the other would type. We didn't know the names of some of the symbols so we made up our own names. Tilde will always be the 'squiggly' to me.
I agree with the author that oddly Basic syntax is closer to Assembly than most languages so is an ok place to start.
I'd like to see Dijkstra write an Assembly program without JMP.
Learned how to render graphics the hard way in Apple BASIC back in grade school. Was fun.
My kids have been surprisingly interested when I show them Commodore 64 or BBC Micro BASIC. I was expecting them to groan but they wanted to write their own programs on them. They're also more interested when it's a physical machine than an emulator.
I think it's a bad idea to start with BASIC in this day and age. However, I do think it's a very good idea to teach student BASIC once they've learned a modern language. It's a great way to teach them why programming works the way it does and to teach about the roots.