In general, the macro recorder is a great way to learn. Just turn the recorder on, do a bunch of things, stop it, and look a the code. A lot of times I will record a bunch of actions, then tweak the code to make it more general, and then wrap loops around the code. In 30 minutes you can do a days worth of programming.

Line numbers

Gotos were required for almost anything

No If then else

Variable names are only one character long

Over time, all of these deficiencies were eliminated in subsequent dialects of Basic.

Basic eventually evolved into a professional programming language. The problem is that a lot of those advanced features are hard to understand for a beginner. It would be a very unusual 14 year old who would be using recursion and OOPS.

What we need is a language with training wheels. I think the best approach would be five levels. Set the level (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5). Each is a superset of the previous level. Start at level 1 and 95 percent of the complexity of programming is hidden from you. Get good at level 1 and then change the level to level 2, etc. Those who are good and motivated can move up to level 5, which has all of the complexities and power that one finds in a professional programming language.

The first question to ask is, "How do I display 'Hello World'?" If you have to create a class, or declare a variable to do so, something is wrong. It should be one line — e.g., Print "Hello World!".

Once you got to level 3, I think there would be quite a lot of power available.

Microsoft Visual Basic 6 was fairly straight forward. (With VB.Net, the .Net stuff adds far too much complexity for a beginner.) Visual Basic for Applications is basically a subset of VB 6. Get rid of some of its power and one would have a great language for beginners. At the same time, it is important that a teaching language not develop bad habits (e.g., Gotos).

James Mitchell

<a href="http://www.jmitchell.me” target=”_blank”>www.jmitchell.me

I take the point that what strikes me as “natural” is really the result of a lot of practice. To a beginner, I might recommend The Little Schemer (yes, Scheme does seem to be a popular candidate for a beginner’s language) or maybe A Little Java, A Few Patterns, but would a real beginner find these books intuitive?

Similarly, Ruby seems like a real “natural” programming language to me. Most of the time, it seems to do what I want it to. But maybe this is the result of playing around with Basic (yes, in High School) and then Lisp, C++, Perl, Java, etc.

My guess, though, is that for the right kind of beginner, lisp-type recursion and OOPs patterns would be useful right off the bat, or pretty soon thereafter.

Regards,

Nick

Why always start teaching in Scheme? ( http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/ )

I am reminded of the early days of New Math. Talking early sixties here. I was getting traditional math while the cool kids were getting New Math. They struggled mightily. I watched some of the things they were doing. They didn’t make sense until I got to college. These poor kids were so damaged they probably still can’t balance a checkbook.

The reasons I learnt BASIC were:
- It was there. No installation or special tools needed, I could just start using it.
- It let me do impressive/useful stuff. I created a birthday cake ASCII animation and played back “happy birthday” for my little sister. I wrote a D&D character generator.
- I knew it wasn’t just a learning tool, it felt like I was using something grown-up. I’m sure I would have learnt better principles from Logo, but something about steering a turtle didn’t fit with my 11 year-old ideas of cool.
- It had an appealing air of the possibility of wrong-doing. I could hit the BREAK key in my favorite game, and LET GOLD=2000. I was pretty sure that kid in Wargames must be using BASIC too.

It seems like most kids who’re interested in computers these days learn a bit of HTML, and from there it’s a short step to putting in a SCRIPT tag and trying out some javascript. It’s available on all computers, just needs a text editor to create, lets you do neat/annoying things like animated images and popup windows easily, and is something that adults use.

The lure of the forbidden is pretty strong there too, just think of script kiddies. Sure, almost no kids will actually do anything wrong with javascript, but it definitely enhances its coolness, a lot more than being able to use it for math problems.

http://www.geocities.com/KindlyRat/GWBASIC.html

I tried it and it seems to be the genuine article. Even runs in a “DOS Command Window”.

http://rc3.org/2006/09/the_golden_age.php