A couple of days ago I was at a Starbucks. I sat down around a large table to enjoy my coffee and a pastry. There were several other people there. I pulled out my iPhone to check my email. There was a fellow across from me with one of the new Macbook Air laptops, and a few minutes later a young man also sat down and pulled out a black Macbook. This concentration of Apple equipment made it easy for us to begin talking.
When it came to what sort of work we do, I shared about my business selling programming tools. I moved over to the fellow with the black Macbook and told him I wanted to show him my website so he could understand my business. When I showed him the Learn tab on the Run BASIC site and began to walk him through the examples the other people at the table came over to watch. As we went from simple "hello world!" to some easy graphics examples the reaction from onlookers was amazement! They clearly were not aware that programming could be so simple and cool. To them this was something way above them, and very dry.
What I took away from this is that people don't know that programming can be fun. They can do it, and years ago the average computer user did his own programming, in BASIC. Nowadays what gets promoted as programming is too hard, and it's no surprise that people don't want to do that. This is a misapplication of technology that makes things harder, and not easier.
We need to turn back the clock in this important area of programming.
Showing posts with label easy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label easy. Show all posts
BASIC is bad because it's too easy?
A response to a recent post read, "BASIC is good, but I think it should be avoided as a first language because it pampers the programmer too much."
I won't be the first person to say that BASIC is perfect. There is no perfect language. However, to recommend that a first language should not "pamper" the beginning programmer seems to me misses the mark completely.
I'm guessing that this means that languages should force the beginner to be aware of low level details such as the type of numeric value (int, float, byte, etc.) or that the beginner should made to manage the allocation and deallocation of memory. What do these sorts of things have to do with the essense of programming? Since there are many languages which do not have these kinds of features, I can only submit that they aren't essential to programming. Therefore they are not necessary ideas to teach the beginner.
The nitty gritty details of how a computer works ARE important. These things should be taught to any serious student of computers, but they do not need to be the first thing taught. People who do not fancy themselves experts do not need to be bothered to learn them.
Easy is the quality that BASIC has, especially in the quickness of its learnability. This is almost to a fault I agree in the sense that a slightly more general and abstract language might be a little harder to warm up to but better in the long haul. However for the person who programs for fun, or who needs a light language for writing utilities or small personal applications, I think BASIC hits the mark pretty well.
I won't be the first person to say that BASIC is perfect. There is no perfect language. However, to recommend that a first language should not "pamper" the beginning programmer seems to me misses the mark completely.
I'm guessing that this means that languages should force the beginner to be aware of low level details such as the type of numeric value (int, float, byte, etc.) or that the beginner should made to manage the allocation and deallocation of memory. What do these sorts of things have to do with the essense of programming? Since there are many languages which do not have these kinds of features, I can only submit that they aren't essential to programming. Therefore they are not necessary ideas to teach the beginner.
The nitty gritty details of how a computer works ARE important. These things should be taught to any serious student of computers, but they do not need to be the first thing taught. People who do not fancy themselves experts do not need to be bothered to learn them.
Easy is the quality that BASIC has, especially in the quickness of its learnability. This is almost to a fault I agree in the sense that a slightly more general and abstract language might be a little harder to warm up to but better in the long haul. However for the person who programs for fun, or who needs a light language for writing utilities or small personal applications, I think BASIC hits the mark pretty well.
Debugging Run BASIC Web Apps
In Run BASIC's first release there is effectively no built-in debugger. Of course you can use print to log to the browser page or to a file, and this is no more or less than many other web scripting systems. We aim to do something about this in the very near future.
One of our users suggested that it would be good to create an inspector panel in Run BASIC itself and that we should add some reflection via an EVAL$() function that would allow arbitrary execution of BASIC code at runtime. We would probably also need to at least metaprogramming features like the ability to get information from the runtime like:
One of our users suggested that it would be good to create an inspector panel in Run BASIC itself and that we should add some reflection via an EVAL$() function that would allow arbitrary execution of BASIC code at runtime. We would probably also need to at least metaprogramming features like the ability to get information from the runtime like:
- The name of the current context (ie. function or subroutine)
- The names of all the variables and arrays in scope
- The source code for the current context
- A collection of objects that models the stack
- Probably more stuff
While this sort of thing is possible I think that we probably will initially provide a high level runtime inspection panel that the programmer can show and hide as needed. This is BASIC after all, and it should be as easy as possible to use. The metaprogramming stuff is cool though. ;-)
Run BASIC Tour Video Posted
One big challenge we face in explaining Run BASIC to people is that people have a preconceived notion of what an easy programming system is. Ruby on Rails is supposed to be easy, right? Easy compared to what? Java server pages? Apache and Perl? For a certain class of problems we need the kind of easy that BASIC (and I don't mean Visual Basic) has always provided.
So, today I created a 20 minute video that walks through installation, startup, and gives a tour of the features of the Run BASIC programming software and several examples. This includes creation and hosting of a simple app. Visit the Run BASIC site and check out the video and I'm sure you'll agree that you've never seen anything easier.
So, today I created a 20 minute video that walks through installation, startup, and gives a tour of the features of the Run BASIC programming software and several examples. This includes creation and hosting of a simple app. Visit the Run BASIC site and check out the video and I'm sure you'll agree that you've never seen anything easier.
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