Applesoft Basic: still in my fingers somehow

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Published by dchud on October 20th, 2006 in applesoft basic

After another head-spinning conversation this morning with my friend R. (who is, somehow, blogless) I revisited the recent piece "Why Johnny can't code" by David Brin in Salon. I don't think he said exactly why he doesn't think Python can do the job, or why line-oriented coding makes such a difference, although I'm tending to think he's right.

In any case, I know for certain that something about Basic stuck in my head after all those years typing in adventure games and making lines dance on an apple ][+ screen. I know because I just did this:

applesoft-basic

...in about 20 seconds. I made only one syntactic mistake, due to the pythoning of my brain: at first I'd typed "20 PRINT 'HI'" with single-quotes. Somehow I remembered the looping syntax, and that you *could* just say "30 NEXT" but that it was better to specify your loop vars.

Apparently David Brin knows of what he speaks.

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Jonathan (not verified) on October 23rd 2006

I'm not convinced that there's anything special about 'line coding'. There is something special about kids having access to a programming language that they can do 'real stuff' in. The problem that an Apple II was SO MUCH SIMPLER. With just Basic, which was included, you could do cool stuff that was nearly as good as the commercial software you were buying!

That this isn't true anymore is a problem for kids learning about computers. I'm not sure what the solution is. But I'm not sure it has much to do with the 'type' of language, beyond 'fairly simple'. I don't think there's anything special about 'line coding'.

There is logo. Mandatory No Child Left Behind By Logo!

Jonathan (not verified) on October 23rd 2006

For instance, the guy says:

"nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. "

Huh? Why ever does he think this? Nothing even _remotely_ huh? I think you can do something "remotely" like that in:
Logo
Perl
Scheme
Interpreted pascal

At least. There are dozens of languages in which one can write little simple programs to illustrate an algorithm. I don't know where this guy gets the idea that somehow you can only do that in BASIC.

[Although I will say that, yes, I too first learned to program in BASIC and then LOGO.]

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