> From: Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > The Fool wrote: > > > I'm not the one going around claiming how much better it was in > > day... > > Aw, c'mon. David was looking for this for a very specific teaching > purpose. It brought back a great memory of the first time I managed to
> print a sine wave with asterisks on a (30 baud>) Teletype. Suddenly, I > grasped the relationship between the code and what it spits out -- and > that it could be more than just letters and numbers. Perhaps David and > I have resonant outdated ideas about how to learn to use computers > because we were both early adopters, whereas you came long much later My first experience with computers were Apple II's in elementary school. My first computer was an IBM XT with MS-DOS 3 and an amber monitor (which ran primarily GWBasic). Oh, and I can program on an IBM 370 with COBOL. > and thus may be absolutely right. However, there's being right and > there's being smart... > > Your insistence that he could choose something better is taking his > request far beyond his goal -- which makes it seem to me as though > you're really saying that he's using the wrong approach to teaching his It just seems that their is a disconnect between what he says he is after and what he wants, which is something that conforms to his notions of 'how things should work'. I've typed dozens of old programs from books just like the ones he describes into gwbasic, applebasic, Qbasic, and visual basic. They _always_ ran perfectly well. What if their was no chipmunkbasic? Would he have still been whining about not being able to find the 'right' interpreter two years from now? Sometimes you have to settle for what exists. And he still wasn't able to come up with any explanation as to what was 'wrong' with Qbasic. Perhaps there's a 'How things ought to work' collory to the 'Golden age' meme. > children. That just doesn't seem like a good idea, given that he didn't > ask our advice on that subject. > > In my experience, it's a bad idea to give people advice unless they ask > for it. Giving unsolicited advice about how to behave toward their > children is out at the asymptote of the ranking of badness of such > ideas... even (or maybe especially) when the person in question is my > own "kid." Actually I was mostly just trying to criticize his remarks about how Mr. Gates is taking away the ability of future entrepreneurs to do what Mr. Gates himself did (Qbasic shipped windows with up till win98SE), which is the same kind of argument as the 'golden age' meme. You'll notice he didn't respond to any of my remarks until I said that, and then he acted very emotionally, very negatively to that remark, which I believe was the fuel for his later remarks. I think I touched a nerve. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
