Re: Beginner's Language?

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@home.com>]

David Gillon wrote:
> Ola Rinta-Koski wrote:
> >
> > (let ((foo 0))
> >   (dotimes (i 5)
> >     (incf foo (read)))
> >   foo)
> >
> > > Now look at it. Could a neophite with literally *zero*
> > > experience in programming computers read it and stand a chance of
> > > understanding what it does or how it does it?
> >
> >   Not being a neophyte, I'll just have to guess: yes and yes.
> 
> Well, I'll admit that despite a CS degree (including a course
> specifically aimed at comparing different languages) and fifteen years
> in the industry I can't claim to know what this code does, so any
> complete neophyte is going to be floundering. I can guess we have a loop
> doing something to Foo, but beyond that ...? Sum five (could also be 6)
> inputs seems most likely, but that's based on my knowledge of parallel
> constructs in other languages and therefore more than a true neophyte
> could get.
> 
> Despite all the criticisms that can legitimately be levelled at BASIC I
> originally taught myself to code from BASIC examples in computer
> magazines, I don't believe that would have been true if they had looked
> like the example above instead of paralleling natural language. And what
> BASIC does better than this Pascal and Ada do better still.

A number of posts ago, someone mentioned "general purpose". One of the
things that most people seem to forget in this type of discussion, is
whether or not a "general purpose" language is being considered (I
believe this is assumed by most here).

If you truly want something simpler for people to learn from, 
*** take away the "general purpose" requirement. ***

As mentioned in the current post (above), BASIC helped many newbies
get started. Why?  BASIC was simple to understand, & it put you in
a restricted "shell" of sorts, with very simple commands to use. Ie:

LOAD "PROGRAM"
SAVE "PROGRAM"
RUN
LIST
etc.

The _environment_ and the simple language combined, made it easy. It
was also easy, because it was not totally "general purpose" (it does
not interface well with many things that one would use under UNIX today,
for example).

If all you had to do was control a few things, you can really simplify
the language. A hypothetical example might be (for a controller):

   Open door.
   Close window.

A two step, but specialized language program.  However, if you had to 
code that in assembler language, a completely general purpose language,
you would have perhaps 200 to 1000+ lines of code to read. The difference
was simply between a specialized language and a general one.

			- My Point -  ;-)

So my point is that when you consider a "beginner's language", consider
his needs first. Does he need a totally general purpose language, or
can he get by with a reasonable subset of "general"?  If he can be
happy with the bare minimum, then languages like BASIC are a good
place to start.

In addition to the language, you might also consider the "environment"
also. If the user is foreign to UNIX shells for example, than a BASIC
subsystem might be more productive for him.

I'm not promoting BASIC for general use here-- only discussing the
needs of beginners.

As a side note, I find it interesting that a
number of high schools teach kids here BASIC using QBASIC that was
distributed free on Windoze-95 CD's (it might also be on Win98).
You have to look for it on the install CD-- it won't be installed
for you.  If my daughter can use it (as impatient as she is), then
this says something to me about the success of this approach.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://members.home.net/ve3wwg