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My Own Experience with Basic and teaching programming: I know from teaching kids is that LINE NUMBERS makes more sense to them. Personally I HATE line numbers
by baldfat 8y ago
My Own Experience with Basic and teaching programming:
I know from teaching kids is that LINE NUMBERS makes more sense to them. Personally I HATE line numbers and think they are the devil.
I was showing kids my old 1970s code books that I use to copy into basic and play games. I told them how I was in 1st grade and that my dad would help debug them with me. They all wanted to try and one kid copied a good 300 lines for a battleship game. For some reason the logical numbers made sense to them. That kid must have played that game dozens of times because he felt like he made it.
My own opinion is that BASIC shouldn't be used to teach programming. I opt for Racket.
- mntmoss 8y agoI know where those kids are coming from. I understood 8-bit BASICs "better" than I did QBASIC, because I could spatially follow the flow of a program written with GOTO: knowing the line number told me roughly where in the code it would land. But code that used labels and indirection(arrays, pointers, that kind of thing) was beyond me for quite a while, so I didn't fully understand most of the interesting listings, even though I could type them in and find data assignments or comparisons to change. Modern languages pack in tons of indirection because that's where the power tools are - but an introductory environment might benefit from cutting down on that.
- ddingus 8y agoYes. I think it was Atari BASIC that allowed GOTO (X*100)+1000 Lol, found out later why that was bad, but as a kid, why not? What else are the numbers for?