Re: My First Computer (was Computing Editorial)

[BJ <dontspamme@nosirree.net>]

On Thu, 06 Feb 2003 17:51:28 GMT, Lee Hart <leeahart@earthlink.net>
wrote:

>Lee Hart wrote:
>>> What does a computer need to be a great learning tool? One that can
>>> capture a person's imagination; make him/her *want* to learn more?
>>> Here are some ideas:
>>>
>>> 1. It needs a built-in easy-to-use programming language.
>
>Ruud Baltissen Ruud.Baltissen@abp.nl wrote:
>> People with another native language than English have one
>> disadvantage: all programming languages I know are based on English.
>
>Not all; for example, APL and machine language, as Holger Petersen and
>Paul Schlyter remind us. But most programming languages are indeed
>english. That's a disadvantage when a majority of the world's population
>doesn't speak english (and, coincidentally, where computer skills are
>the most lacking).
>
>So, a language that doesn't require good english is an asset, so a
>beginner doesn't have to learn too much at once. (How popular would
>computers be in America if you had to read/write some foreign language
>to use it? :-)
>
>Roy Exegete wrote:
>> A LOGO that does more than just turtles (I know, nearly all did, but
>> that's all I ever saw my kids taught in school) and that can compile.
>
>LOGO is great for beginners! Even children too young to read can use it
>when the keyboard is marked with icons (forward, turnright, penup,
>pendown, etc.) This works especially well when the computer is a
>physical "turtle" robot, not a simulation on a screen.
>
>And, LOGO still thrives today. I read the comp.lang.logo list and there
>is a lot of very interesting stuff going on. Modern LOGOs are as
>powerful as C++ and Java. However, they are no longer simple. It's
>become just another language for advanced programming.
>
>Ruud Baltissen Ruud.Baltissen@abp.nl wrote:
>> Regarding the language itself: any language is good as long as you
>> have a good tutorial and don't need complicated instructions to
>> perform something at all.
>
>A good tutorial and lots of examples helps to learn any language. But
>the language itself must also be structured to make it easy to learn. It
>can't have too steep a learning curve: That's the problem with machine
>language; you have to know too much to do even simple things. People get
>discouraged and quit before they have learned enough about it to be
>useful.
>
>> This is one of the reasons I advise people to start with Basic. A
>> simple '10 print "Hallo"' is enough to archive something.
>
>BASIC is good. It is weak for constructing large programs, but great for
>small ones. It's a kind of baby-talk for computers. Even young children
>can learn it quickly, but will (hopefully) outgrow it at some point and
>learn something better.
>
>It has the drawback of being english-oriented, but that is fixable (as
>others have pointed out) by keeping the keywords and tokens in a table
>that the user can change. A neat aspect to this is automatic
>translation; I might write a program in english, email the tokenized
>form to a friend in Germany, who LISTs it in german!
>
>I think the big downfall of BASIC is its lack of extensibility. It's
>great to start with a minimal set of keywords; but you quickly want more
>capability. Adding it with GOSUBs quickly produces a mess. So, I think
>what you want is a way to extend the language as you learn, like LOGO
>and FORTH.
>
<snip>
Some versions of BASIC from the period support extensions.
VAX BASIC for one, and various flavors of TI BASIC (Extended BASIC for
the 99/4) was another. These extensions were later picked up in
QBASIC.
The extensions I speak of are SUBprograms, called by name, with
parameter lists...
TI XB allowed such subprograms, and had the ability to merge these
subprograms into a program for reuse.  TI XB was released circa
1981-82.
Not only this, but TI XB supported calling assembly programs by name,
with parameters, as well...