On Aug 11, 2004, at 1:41 PM, Davd Brin wrote:
My biggest example is the silent, unnoticed vanishing of any programming language from personal computers.
I swear, I CANNOT GET A MACHINE WITH SIMPLE BASIC IN ORDER TO TEACH IT TO MY SON!
It has taken 2 years, and I hope to get an old pentium machine soon with DOS 6.2 and BASIC aboard, so I can teach him the fundamentals of moving a dot via a simple algorithm. Silently, unnoticed, this has happened and a new generation will be able to make web pages and fancy Flash digitals... but without any grasp of the line coding underneath.
Very disturbing.
Good 'ole BASIC has gone bye-bye -- there is Visual Basic of course, but it's certainly not for children.
There is a free GNU Java IDE that the writers claim to be good for teaching programming. Versions are available for Windoze, Linix and OSX
http://judo.sourceforge.net/
Haven't used it myself, but if it can really give kids a good foundation in Java, that would be a Good Thing, IMHO
Jim
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