3 ms·

Why Johnny Can't Code

3 points by OhMeadhbh 3y ago

ggm 3y ago
There are heaps of easy ways for kids to get hooked on programming. Almost arguably too many. The point was, until a comparatively long time had passed, typing in BASIC was almost ALL Johnny could do. Entire forests of trees were cut down, pulped and turned into numbered line input programs in magazines to play mastermind, tic-tac-toe, table lookup adventure games, or before the modscene was cool, moire pattern b&w interference fringe freak out pop art graphics. Johnny or Joanna could even be tricked into hard drugs like systems programming a Kansas city standard cassette tape reader and writer, or a new Font. BASIC was a gateway drug. Kids, if you learned about recursion, don't tell mom.
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  Re-read the article. It's not about how hard it is for kids to learn about programming, it's about how difficult it is to fine a mass of kids who all know the same language and how you can turn on your Commodore 64 and be typing a program 6 seconds later. You really can't do that with any modern system. Heck, it takes 10 seconds for my C64 emulator to load on Android.
  - ggm 3y ago
    I did read the article. My point stands. Because all you could do was program at a REPL a huge cohort of kids learned to program at a REPL. There wasn't a magic algol-68 coding scene at home for a reason: BASIC was what you got when you turned it on. You had to go to punch cards for the other way. There was one lingua franca for kids at home. The shared experience was huge. We've reached a point where deliberately constraints on what a general purpose computer can do might be pedagogically necessary. Much as we give kids cuisenaire rods and abacii when they are small (I made log cabins and ballista with mine) rather than an HP calculator.
    - OhMeadhbh 3y ago
      I think you missed the point. I guess it's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there.
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
I love this essay, but at the same time understand why it would be very, very difficult to recapture the days of my youth. BASIC was, absolutely, a carrier of culture in a way that no programming language is today. There were armies of geeky young kids in the suburbs who got Commodore 64s or TI 99/4s for x-mas. Maybe one in ten kept with it to the point they wrote a halfway complex program. But that's still tens or hundreds of thousands of kids all experiencing the same joy of debugging programs you typed in from a print magazine. BASIC defined what we knew about computing and to paraphrase McLuhan... "The programming language is the program." And BASIC itself got stuffed into early micros 'cause 6502 or 8080 assembly is irritating, if not hard. Chuck Peddle commented on a Computer History Museum Oral History that they originally thought of the 6502 as an industrial or automotive controller, and it wasn't until people like Woz and Bill Gates were stuffing BASIC into Apple ]['s and Commodore PETS (I think the TRS-80 originally had Tiny BASIC)... but it wasn't until BASIC appeared built into the system that the "rough patches" were worn down. Sure, BASIC is a crap language compared to <whatever your current favourite language is>, but it ran in 4-8K of 8080 or 6502 opcodes. Try and stuff Python in to 8k. BASIC was "good enough" to write simple programs on primitive microcomputers. And the experience of just turning something on and typing at a BASIC program 6 seconds later is sort of lost. And while I love my leenucks bocks, I do sort of miss my 99/4.
lapcat 3y ago
(2006)

3 points by OhMeadhbh 3y ago

ggm 3y ago

There are heaps of easy ways for kids to get hooked on programming. Almost arguably too many. The point was, until a comparatively long time had passed, typing in BASIC was almost ALL Johnny could do. Entire forests of trees were cut down, pulped and turned into numbered line input programs in magazines to play mastermind, tic-tac-toe, table lookup adventure games, or before the modscene was cool, moire pattern b&w interference fringe freak out pop art graphics. Johnny or Joanna could even be tricked into hard drugs like systems programming a Kansas city standard cassette tape reader and writer, or a new Font. BASIC was a gateway drug. Kids, if you learned about recursion, don't tell mom.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
Re-read the article. It's not about how hard it is for kids to learn about programming, it's about how difficult it is to fine a mass of kids who all know the same language and how you can turn on your Commodore 64 and be typing a program 6 seconds later. You really can't do that with any modern system. Heck, it takes 10 seconds for my C64 emulator to load on Android.
- ggm 3y ago
  I did read the article. My point stands. Because all you could do was program at a REPL a huge cohort of kids learned to program at a REPL. There wasn't a magic algol-68 coding scene at home for a reason: BASIC was what you got when you turned it on. You had to go to punch cards for the other way. There was one lingua franca for kids at home. The shared experience was huge. We've reached a point where deliberately constraints on what a general purpose computer can do might be pedagogically necessary. Much as we give kids cuisenaire rods and abacii when they are small (I made log cabins and ballista with mine) rather than an HP calculator.
  - OhMeadhbh 3y ago
    I think you missed the point. I guess it's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

I love this essay, but at the same time understand why it would be very, very difficult to recapture the days of my youth. BASIC was, absolutely, a carrier of culture in a way that no programming language is today. There were armies of geeky young kids in the suburbs who got Commodore 64s or TI 99/4s for x-mas. Maybe one in ten kept with it to the point they wrote a halfway complex program. But that's still tens or hundreds of thousands of kids all experiencing the same joy of debugging programs you typed in from a print magazine. BASIC defined what we knew about computing and to paraphrase McLuhan... "The programming language is the program." And BASIC itself got stuffed into early micros 'cause 6502 or 8080 assembly is irritating, if not hard. Chuck Peddle commented on a Computer History Museum Oral History that they originally thought of the 6502 as an industrial or automotive controller, and it wasn't until people like Woz and Bill Gates were stuffing BASIC into Apple ]['s and Commodore PETS (I think the TRS-80 originally had Tiny BASIC)... but it wasn't until BASIC appeared built into the system that the "rough patches" were worn down. Sure, BASIC is a crap language compared to <whatever your current favourite language is>, but it ran in 4-8K of 8080 or 6502 opcodes. Try and stuff Python in to 8k. BASIC was "good enough" to write simple programs on primitive microcomputers. And the experience of just turning something on and typing at a BASIC program 6 seconds later is sort of lost. And while I love my leenucks bocks, I do sort of miss my 99/4.

lapcat 3y ago

(2006)