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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch.

Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug.

BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.

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You're giving me ideas-- My oldest is nine and that's probably around the age when I first got my own computer (a 286) and dove into QBasic. There's no way he'd choose to spend time in BASIC unless it was his only option. I have an ancient Thinkpad gathering dust, maybe I'll install DOS 6.22 on that sucker and have it boot straight into QBasic from autoexec.bat.

At bedtime we're a "you don't have to sleep, but you have to be quiet" household so if he had it in his room it might see some use.

A C64 Maxi would be more welcome, at least for me.

For kids who grew up with smartphones and other visual devices it's extremely hard to build something "sexy" in the first few weeks with basic.

You need some visual thing for the appeal.

I think aiming for visual appeal is a dead end or at least a false dawn.

Instead aiming for that Frankenstein moment of excitement ‘holy shit this thing is kinda alive!’ Is where you want to get to.

I introduced a friend’s kid to basic the other day. She’s about 9 and was already getting the idea of an input, making some decisions and writing an output. Even with that just being text she was excited, and was already having her own ideas what to do next.

I failed my school computing class assignment in BASIC because instead of making the word game I spent all my time labouring away chasing the visual appeal of getting BASIC to draw a fancy intro screen.

I ended up working in computer graphics :-)

I agree with your sentiment re: scratch though. With scratch I struggle to pull kids away from the drawing and asset selection tools. I’d like scratch without this.

Why not both? My Atari 800 came with a BASIC and a Logo cartridge. Logo was the thing that got my attention first because it could draw pictures on a TV screen right away, but writing BASIC programs and storing them on a cassette tape was the thing that got me hooked for life.

Most BASICs had some primitive form of Logo language "on board". You send DRAW commands in strings e.g. "r90 f100". Clearly not as nice as having Logo installed on your computer.

The Apple II had single-pixel and line drawing with absolute coordinates. There was a clever “shapes tables” thing that was used to draw images on screen (I used it to draw text with nice looking proportional fonts)

> don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch.

Because there is no such thing as a syntax error in scratch. 10 year olds are not great at typing, spelling, or paying attention to the small details.

Scratch rules out a whole class of bugs and allows the kids to jump right into solving the interesting problems.

I think we’re making things much too easy. Kids like challenges. my 6 year old can spell plenty of words. A 9 year old can definitely memorise PRINT, GOTO, INPUT and SLEEP.

The problems they solve sure aren't easy. I myself found it challenging to build a robust platformer character with wall jumping and enemy collisions and things. Zac and I both had quite different solutions, and Zac did some further research on youtube for a much better solution that both of us had.

When I was in high school (around 2000) they had three CS courses that kids could take - the first was in QBasic, the second was in Turbo Pascal, and the third was in C++ for the AP CS exam.

Ours also had Fox Pro, and we did all of them (one per year). They also had optional Novel, Linux, UNIX and Mac courses (with certifications). Late 90s - early 2000 were a hoot.

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