Why Jonny Can't Code

[pontellen]

I think the reason might be something different entirely. I've noticed that the Jonnys of today have no interest, curiosity, fascination with, or drive to explore computers and how they work. Of course they use technology voraciously. This may be a generational thing. Today, they are so swamped with technology and take it all for granted, and don't even see it as a field worth pursuing. I may date myself, but having grown up when there were no PCs at schools, and getting my first introduction to them in college has left me with a life long appreciation for them, and subsequently writing code. I see the same at work (Not an IT company), those with the most interest and drive are older. Of course the same young generation doesn't read, for example books by Ray Kurzweil such as The Singularity is Near. Those few Jonnys who have that interest and drive are still there, creating the future companies and products. Think Google, Facebook, etc...

[TheGreatAndPowerfulOz]

PIEBALDconsult wrote:

It seems to me that you can't teach "structured programming" unless you've introduced the class to its opposite.

that's ridiculous in the extreme. so if you want to learn math you must first learn non-math? or to learn to cook you must first learn to non-cook?

[TheMandolinMan]

Download a C64 or Atari simulator. Voila - BASIC. And you can do cool things like poke characters on the screen, write garbage into the keyboard buffer, and create your own 8-bit chip tunes!

[Alan Balkany]

The article has a point. When you first learn to program, it's overwhelming because a beginner has to learn a wide variety of "mini-skills" all at once, in order to get the simplest thing working. Miss even one of them, and the program fails, and the beginner often doesn't have a clue what's wrong. Sure there are most sophisticated platforms out there. But a sophisticated platform is counterproductive to the initial programming learning experience. BASIC is simple, which makes it ideal to learn the concepts of programming. It's interpreted so you can bypass the concepts of compiling and linking. Line numbers and gotos are intuitive. Even as simple as C is, there are still complexities (for the beginner) like main () and #include <stdio.h> that distract, must be explained, and add more unnecessary uncertainty to the initial programming experiences.

[DiscoJimmy]

The guys a decent writer, but he's a bit too nostalgic, or just really bad at finding things online. He's totally obsessed with a particular version of BASIC, for some reason. He even mentions QBASIC in his article as one he passed up. That's how I learned to code - after having a TRS 80 16k I was thrilled to get QBASIC on an PC. He keeps going on about how he just wants the kid to able to sit down and punch stuff in with out the hurdles, but QBASIC is actually easier AND better. You don't need line numbers, you have an actual text editor so you don't have to retype a whole line to fix a mistake, etc. He could easily have sat the kid down with QBASIC and punched in all those examples. And if he doesn't like that there's SmallBasic, or Ruby, or for that matter he knocks Python for being too high level, but you can enter BASIC examples in Ruby or Python with only trivial syntax changes. And they're interpreted just like BASIC, so no dealing with a compiler. Basically he just wanted to whine about 'how good it used to be' instead of downloading some of these things from the interwebs. But then I guess he wouldn't have an article.

[DiscoJimmy]

... and just to be clear, I'm not saying he doesn't have a point. I learned through punching in BASIC line by line and i think everyone should experience that. I'm just baffled that he insists that experience is so inaccessible nowadays.

[Marc Clifton]

Richard Jones wrote:

I can "hear" CRTs tube whine. I was really glad when we switched to LCD.

Me too. At least, I used to. I also couldn't understand why people had these fancy CRT's and graphic cards but would keep the refresh rate at 60Hz. The flicker would drive me nuts. Marc

Will work for food. Interacx

I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner

[Dan Neely]

Not everyone is susceptible to flicker. I only ever notice 60hz flicker from 10' and a 45* angle; meanwhile higher resolution is always useful and the highest generally are where the CRT bottoms out at 60hz max. OTOH I've never met anyone who could use the 85hz interlaced (42.5 effective) mode on 90's era systems; which makes me wonder why they ever offered it.

The latest nation. Procrastination.

[Flynn Arrowstarr Regular Schmoe]

Beats the VB/C# equivalents: VB

Imports System

Namespace Tutorial
Public Class Hello
Public Shared Sub Main
Dim name As String
Console.WriteLine("Please enter your name.")
name = Console.ReadLine()
Console.WriteLine("Hello there, " & name & "!")
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub ' Main
End Class ' Hello
End Namespace ' Tutorial

C#

using System;

namespace Tutorial {
public class Hello {
public static void Main() {
string name;
Console.WriteLine("Please enter your name.");
name = Console.ReadLine();
Console.WriteLine("Hello there, " + name + "!");
Console.ReadLine();
} // end method Main
} // end class Hello
} // end namespace Tutorial

I'll be nice and not post the 200+ line Windows CE VC++ version... :-\ Flynn

[Dan Neely]

Flynn Arrowstarr wrote:

I'll be nice and not post the 200+ line Windows CE VC++ version... Shucks

I'll be unholy and post the Malbolge hello world program:

('&%:9]!~}|z2Vxwv-,POqponl$Hjig%eB@@>}=<M:9wv6WsU2T|nm-,jcL(I&%$#"
`CB]V?Tx<uVtT`Rpo3NlF.Jh++FdbCBA@?]!~|4XzyTT43Qsqq(Lnmkj"Fhg${z@>

I'll only link to the 99 bottles of beer program due it it's length. http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-malbolge-995.html[^] Edit: fixed escaping problems.

The latest nation. Procrastination.

[Naylun_Stig]

I first started programming in pascal and I found it was a good starting point not too complex but not too simple either. I don't think that a line number language is needed to learn the basics because i still found a small gap jumping from procedural programming to object oriented stuff. It was like learning all over again. I mean you wouldn't want to start a beginner with something like the windows api, but a nice procedural language would be good enough. What i would say is that I think a programmer should be well "read" in a variety of languages even if they are out dated and not commonly used. PS i don't believe in non object oriented languages like how i don't believe in Santa clause :)

[Bob Beechey]

The point is, I think, that modern languages are all about objects and GUIs and handling datasets for, largely, business purposes. The learning curve towards doing anything actually useful is long and steep and uneven. The advantage of the old BASICs was that they were - interpreted, giving instant feed back - had a relatively short, easily assimilated set of reserved words - very small or non-existent libraries - limited graphical capability - used on computers with miniscule RAM and steam-powered CPUs So, learning curve was short but a feel for programming was necessary to do anything at all. So, by and large, people, including quite young children, learned to actually program. Is there a modern equivalent? A pseudo interpreted, multi-paridigm, dynamic language like Python fits the bill very well. It can be used as a spare, procedural language and leave the use of its object-oriented and functional aspects and extensive libraries until you are ready to use them productively. As an aside, its extensive use of lists and dictionaries makes it, in my view, even easier than the BASICs and pascal I used in the 70s.

[TheDarkFreak]

Liberty BASIC. It's a Windows BASIC, and but it can also handle advanced API calls, to introduce more complex concepts. It's what got me started on programming, and I've moved on to do VB, VB.Net, C, C++, Java, and lots of scripting languages. http://www.libertybasic.com The Community site: http://libertybasic.conforums.com He also has a completely free version, that is less functional, Just BASIC: http://www.justbasic.com

[RoboJRR]

Something like that was already made: http://robotbasic.org/[^] :-D

[Filip Bouljon]

If you set the refresh rate at 70 Hz, but you can't compute the next image fast enough, you only update at 35 Hz. You'll have less flicker than at 60Hz, but a less smoothly moving image as well...

[CurtainDog]

Why not Javascript? Easy to get into and no need to download anything (except maybe a browser that supports a canvas if you want some painting).

[ECDinovo]

AdamNThompson wrote:

5 years ago I taught myself how to programm by reading books and tutorials online.

Hey, Adam, I think that's great! You probably got yourself a book like Beginning C# and read through it starting at page 1. I do find it odd that people trying to learn something don't try this logical approach. Although, I must dissent with the forum on one topic: coming out of college, my peers and I appear to have the reverse of the problem described here. We have deep training in x86/MIPS assembly, C, Verilog, and Java SE languages. The problem most of my colleagues faced upon entering the workforce is that real work is done on top of a platform. Be it Java EE on WebSphere, .NET on IIS, Coldfusion on Tomcat, .NET Micro on ARM 9, or whatever. Imagine just knowing the Java SE 1.2 language: that doesn't make you a productive programmer. You need to know how to use the tools, designers, APIs, databases, and servers out there. Raw languages are just academic and don't help you solve your clients' business need. Am I making sense here?

modified on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 7:05 PM

[AspDotNetDev]

Kirk Wood wrote:

I will never subject my kids to Basic. They can learn from a usable language

QuickBasic is very usable, from a beginner perspective. Sure, you're not going to use that language in a real job, but it is fun for very small programs. And much of that programming transfers over to other languages. Not sure I would restrict a beginner student to a certain language just because it is more useful in the real world. Guess it also depends on what they want to do. If they want to make buttons and text boxes and such, C# might be the way to go. If they want to draw some pixels to the screen to make games or physics simulations, QuickBasic would be good. If they are older and interested in a career, something like C# would probably be more ideal. But if they are still in middle school or high school, no harm in having them play with programming for a while.

Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.

[Phil Vacca]

I'm confused. Other than the single line "The "scripting" languages that serve as entry-level tools for today's aspiring programmers -- like Perl and Python -- don't make this experience accessible to students in the same way." there is no mention of the easiest two entry points into programming I can think of. What exactly is wrong with either language? Most of the web is written in Perl... And how can you get any closer to the line numbered experience that the author so forlornly laments than the python interpreter?

[BlueGm]

I'm not sure if you were serious about this question or not, but it actually points to what seems to be the real point of this topic. Learning good programming practices. Early versions of BASIC had an arbitrary GOTO statement that could go to any line of code, not just those that were labelled. That may have been what was meant, but when I think of an "arbitrary" goto, I tend to think of something else. To me, the problem wasn't the language, but the way it was used. I would, therefore, say that an arbitrary GOTO statement is one that doesn't follow a well known and easy to follow pattern. One that leads to what's called spaghetti code. I learned BASIC on my own and learned very quickly to organize my IF, GOTO, and GOSUB statements so that they were easy for me to follow. I was never told to do this, but I learned by example from seeing programs that had been well written. When I got into high school and took a computer programming class (which was a joke for me), I would finish my projects so quickly that I ended up helping other students. That's when I saw the importance of what I had already learned by example. In fact, I ended up polishing my programming style from the examples presented to me in that class (the only thing I did learn from that class). Some of the other students tried to imitate those examples as well and generally had well written and relatively easy to debug code. It would look something like this:

10 x = 1
20 if x <= 10 then goto 60
30 print x
40 x = x + 1
50 goto 20
60 end

This is the BASIC encoding of a while loop (a bad one, since an FOR loop would be easier, but I didn't care to do something more practical for a while loop, such as reading a set of values until no more values remain). I forget what version of BASIC it was now (I learned so many =p). What the other students wrote (those who didn't catch on to the examples)... well, its hard to show with this simple of an example, but when you had more complex statements with any level of nesting, they would fail to structure their code in a way that made it easy to tell what was going on and they would have goto statements that crossed one another (loops would overlap instead of being nested, for example). I could still pick out the path of logic that their program would actually follow, but they couldn't. And my first step in fixing it would have been to organize it into meaningful structures in any case. Of course, when I was helping other students, I couldn't do that for them, and so I spent most