BASICally speaking...

Ugh.

Why Johnny can't code

A friend sent this to me because he and I are both hobby geeks (in addition to being paid geeks) and we've been chatting about programming recently because I'm trying to figure out whether it's actually worthwhile to try and teach Hays python.

When I was in the 6th grade, in one of my weekly classes, we had a TI-99/4A and I learned to program in LOGO on it. Mostly that just meant trying (and mostly failing) at programming the turtle to draw the starship Enterprise. We got pretty good at math, mostly because we had to figure out the angles and everything and make the turtle turn.... But even before that, I remember a two-week summer camp where we worked on Apple ][ programming in BASIC some, but mostly playing games (I think Crystal Castle).

Anyway, what the hell are we going to do!?!

My kids already know the basics of computer usage. They're proficient with Safari and Word and they love playing games and surfing the Lego website.

But what about the good ol' days when you used to get a magazine and the back third of it was dedicated to source code listings (of course, the MacAddict CD does come with tons of cool stuff)? Can we possibly go back there? You know, I just don't think this:

public class Hello {
public static void main(String[] args) {
while ( true ) {
System.out.println("Hello");
}
}
}

Has the same joie de vivre as:

10: print "Hello"
20: goto 10

Ugh!

powered by performancing firefox