Home computers used to boot to a BASIC interpreter. To do anything you needed to use a little bit of BASIC.
Looking at HN threads we see many people who claim this one thing created very many programmers.
But back when it was happening we had teachers giving remedial classes to force BASIC users to "unlearn" bad habits. (There's probably a "BASIC considered harmful" somewhere).
What language would you recommend for 8 year olds?
> (There's probably a "BASIC considered harmful" somewhere).
Edsger Dijkstra: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
I do not subscribe to this opinion. I think BASIC (at least the flavor Dijkstra was talking about) does encourage bad programming habits, but everything can be remedied with exposure to better languages and practices.
I actually agree with you: BASIC helped make a lot of people interested in programming. I know GW Basic, and later Quick Basic, did this for me.
I agree with the article that JavaScript is a good choice. Nothing to install. No way (or there should be no way) to accidentally wipe the disk. Easy to share your code.
Now, JavaScript certainly has some ugly parts, but the difference between it and the old-school BASICs is that it's possible (with care) to avoid most of the ugly parts in JavaScript. That wasn't possible with BASIC.
Looking at HN threads we see many people who claim this one thing created very many programmers.
But back when it was happening we had teachers giving remedial classes to force BASIC users to "unlearn" bad habits. (There's probably a "BASIC considered harmful" somewhere).
What language would you recommend for 8 year olds?