Noel Rappin Writes Here

We interrupt Python week to bring you the following alternative programming rant. I know, Python week has sort of gone up in smoke. But one of our mottoes here is “Whenever a Hugo Award winning SF novelist writes a hyperbolic screed about BASIC in the public schools, 10 Print Hello will be there”. As a motto, it’s not very catchy. We’re working on it.

As soon as I mentioned “Hugo Award winner”, “BASIC” and “hyperbolic screed” many of you were probably able to quickly deduce that the author is David Brin, here on Salon wondering what happened to BASIC (you’ll have to watch an ad to view the article):

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.

Does he have your attention yet? He’ll equate the loss of BASIC to an act of war later in the essay. Brin seems to be making three separate points:

• BASIC used to be available on all computers that kids touch, and that is no longer the case. This is obviously true, but a bit less dramatic than Brin implies.

Brin implies that BASIC was available for kids for a long time, and only recently disappeared. Actually, that’s close to backwards. BASIC was generally available for less than a decade, and has been fading ever since. Even though Brin says a couple of times that “20 years ago” millions of kids could have used BASIC, the fact is that by 1986 BASIC was on its way out as a standard part of home computers.

Although it was invented in the early 60’s, BASIC is associated most strongly with the late ’70s and early 80s generation of computers. This market would eventually be dominated by the Apple ][line, but earlier included things like the TRS/80, and Texas Instruments. (I even remember the Bally TV based game system having a BASIC module circa 1981 or so.). In any case, neither the Mac (introduced in 1984) or the IBM PC and clones featured BASIC to that same degree. By 1985, the idea that all computers would have BASIC was much less strong, although Apple][and BASIC instruction lingered in schools for a few years after that Which is why Brin’s son is still seeing it in math textbooks, although that says more about the textbook industry than anything else. Data point – my middle school had an Apple][ computer lab in 1984 or 5. In my high school, a couple of years later, the computers were already Mac & PC’s without basic – we learned Pascal.

• There is much less of an sense that kids should be taught programming (particularly in BASIC) than there may have been in the mid 80’s.
  Largely true. Another data point – my younger relatives about ten years later were no longer taught BASIC, nor were the kids at elementary schools I studied about the same time. By now, computers had migrated into the actual classroom and were being used as reference and also for what I guess you’d have to call multimedia authoring. I do think this is a loss. But at the same time, I’ve always kind of suspected that the reason why elementary school kids were taught BASIC in the early 80s was because the schools were kind of floundering around for what to do with the shiny new computers. My read of the educational literature during the time I was studying educational technology was that eventually this petered out because it was not clear that teaching programming was helping students become better general learners. To be fair, that’s not exactly the point Brin is arguing, but it does suggest that, perhaps, losing BASIC is not the end of civilization.

• BASIC has some magical set of properties (Brin calls it “line-programming”) that makes it uniquely suitable for introducing programming concepts. Because of this, we’re losing an entire generation of tinkerers. This, I don’t get at all. So, Brin goes on at some length about how the computer people he’s talked to don’t seem to feel that it’s a problem that BASIC isn’t around anymore, while he, Brin, knows better. (Anybody familiar with Brin’s essay entitled “The Dogma of Otherness” should catch at least a hint of irony.) Anyway, while Brin does acknowledge that BASIC has a lot of limitations, he goes on at length about line-programming and how important it is.

I’m not completely sure what Brin means by line-programming. Google didn’t give me a relevant link. I’m going to assume that it has something to do with the fact that BASIC circa the Applesoft years was coded on a line-by-line basis. Brin suggests that this was an experience that modern languages can’t give:

The “scripting” languages that serve as entry-level tools for today’s aspiring programmers – like Perl and Python – don’t make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow! (Indeed, I would love to sit with my son and write “Pong” from scratch. The rule set – the math – is so simple. And he would never see the world the same, no matter how many higher-level languages he then moves on to.)

I confess, I have no idea what he’s saying here, though I do like the scare-quotes around “scripting”. I’m kind of trying to get my head around the idea that you can’t program a mathematical algorithm in Python and follow the reasoning of the machine. I mean, there are higher level constructs, but if we’re talking about loops and conditionals for 5th grade math problems… I think Python would be pretty easy to follow and would look a lot like the logical structure of the algorithm. Python even has an interactive interpreter so you could type the code in line-by-line if you wanted. That actually could be pretty cool in a learning-math setting. And you could even track it with pencil and paper.

It is true, though, that it was much more conceptually simple to do simple graphics in Applesoft BASIC than in Pascal. That’s not the language’s fault, and it’s not because you write Python in a full text editor. It’s because modern programming languages sit on an operating system that mediates access to the drawing controls, and Applesoft BASIC didn’t. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a Python package that emulated the draw controls of Applesoft basic (which were on the order of “Make that pixel blue. Now make that one red”).

I think what I object to is the implication that this is somehow a difficult time to be learning to program, that it’s harder now to get into programming. That’s totally wrong – it’s a fabulous time to be learning to program. Brin says his son is now learning C++, so I’ll assume he’s interested and motivated. Twenty years ago, yeah, he would have had BASIC. And that’s it. Unless you wanted to pay some money. As for seeing any examples of what a real program looked like, forget it.

These days… Well, a Mac OS X box ships with what, a half-dozen or so programming languages right out of the box, with who knows how many all available for free. Want to see basic algorithm code for free? It’s there. All kind of code, complex and simple, is available online. There’s a whole industry of programming books, something I would have devoured as a kid. We’ve traded The One True Teaching Language for many different languages. An elementary school teacher explaining “20 goto 10” is now a publishing empire, plus the internet. Coloring individual dots on a screen is now building a web page, or a web application, or a sprite animation. Even an elementary school child who is motivated can do more and understand more about computers than I would have dreamed in 1985. Have we lost something? Maybe. Have we gained something? Oh yes.