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The big advantage for using BASIC to teach young children is its concreteness. In my experience, some kids have trouble understanding nested blocks (for example
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The big advantage for using BASIC to teach young children is its concreteness. In my experience, some kids have trouble understanding nested blocks (for example in Python, why the stuff in an if block is different than the surrounding code). With BASIC and GOTO everything is explicit and concrete and at the same level. They just have to trace though the program one line at a time to understand it.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoI also find the idea that “if you teach kids bad procedural programming, they’ll form bad habits and struggle with modern languages” to be specious. I grew up with BASIC (Q and TI), then learned a small amount of MATLAB as a physics student. When I took a class in Scheme later in college, I was blown away by how its syntactical constructs prevented me from making the kinds of errors that plagued my imperative/procedural programs - at the cost of some cognitive overhead. Cutting my teeth with GOTO didn’t make me resistant to structured (or functional) programming, it gave me perspective on why it’s often necessary.
- pfraze 6y agoStrongly agree. The constructs are easy to move past, and worth the simplicity you get with the initial learning curve