Why Johnny can't code

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.

By David Brin


Sept. 14, 2006 | For three years -- ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade -- he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.

Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization.

Oh, today's desktops and laptops offer plenty of other fancy things -- a dizzying array of sophisticated services that grow more dazzling by the week. Heck, I am [link|http://www.holocenechat.com/| part of that creative spasm].

Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?)

And yet the thought processes that today's best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizard Sheldon Brown, leader of the Center for Computing in the Arts, says: "In my Electronics for the Arts course, each student built their own single board computer, whose CPU contained a BASIC ROM [a chip permanently encoded with BASIC software]. We first did this with 8052's and then with a chip called the BASIC Stamp. The PC was just the terminal interface to these computers, whose programs would be burned into flash memory. These lucky art students were grinding their own computer architectures along with their code pigments -- along their way to controlling robotic sculptures and installation environments."

But today, very few young people are learning those deeper patterns. Indeed, they seem to be forbidden any access to that world at all.

And yet, they are tantalized! Ben has long complained that his math textbooks all featured little type-it-in-yourself programs at the end of each chapter -- alongside the problem sets -- offering the student a chance to try out some simple algorithm on a computer. Usually, it's an equation or iterative process illustrating the principle that the chapter discussed. These "TRY IT IN BASIC" exercises often take just a dozen or so lines of text. The aim is both to illustrate the chapter's topic (e.g. statistics) and to offer a little taste of programming.

Only no student tries these exercises. Not my son or any of his classmates. Nor anybody they know. Indeed, I would be shocked if more than a few dozen students in the whole nation actually type in those lines that are still published in countless textbooks across the land. Those who want to (like Ben) simply cannot.

Next page: "There are still BASIC programs in textbooks?"

Now, I have been complaining about this for three years. But whenever I mention the problem to some computer industry maven at a conference or social gathering, the answer is always the same: "There are still BASIC programs in textbooks?"

At least a dozen senior Microsoft officials have given me the exact same response. After taking this to be a symptom of cluelessness in the textbook industry, they then talk about how obsolete BASIC is, and how many more things you can do with higher-level languages. "Don't worry," they invariably add, "the newer textbooks won't have any of those little BASIC passages in them."

All of which is absolutely true. BASIC is actually quite tedious and absurd for getting done the vast array of vivid and ambitious goals that are typical of a modern programmer. Clearly, any kid who wants to accomplish much in the modern world would not use it for very long. And, of course, it is obvious that newer texts will abandon "TRY IT IN BASIC" as a teaching technique, if they haven't already.

But all of this misses the point. Those textbook exercises were easy, effective, universal, pedagogically interesting -- and nothing even remotely like them can be done with any language other than BASIC. Typing in a simple algorithm yourself, seeing exactly how the computer calculates and iterates in a manner you could duplicate with pencil and paper -- say, running an experiment in coin flipping, or making a dot change its position on a screen, propelled by math and logic, and only by math and logic: All of this is priceless. As it was priceless 20 years ago. Only 20 years ago, it was physically possible for millions of kids to do it. Today it is not.

In effect, we have allowed a situation to develop that is like a civilization devouring its seed corn. If an enemy had set out to do this to us -- quietly arranging so that almost no school child in America can tinker with line coding on his or her own -- any reasonably patriotic person would have called it an act of war.

Am I being overly dramatic? Then consider a shift in perspective.

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