Do aspiring programmers benefit from learning BASIC (or a variant) first?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by alkis

I understand the feeling about C++, but C?
I don't think there is a simpler language than C.

I hear you but the only people that really say that, myself included, are already familiar with it. We forget the first encounter because there's an epiphany moment with C where suddenly it all clicks and we forget the WTF moments where something compiled but didn't work or when something wouldn't compile but seemed correct. We forget the phases we went through with pointer indirection, multdimensional compact arrays, single dimension arrays of pointers that we could dereference as if they were 2D arrays and how lethally different their internal representations are, etc. It's all muscle memory now and seems like the most obvious thing in the world - precisely because we aren't beginners.

Beginners ask informative questions. Why do you need to declare the return as void? What, it will return an integer by default if I don't specify? Why? If I don't declare any parameters that means what? Oh, I have to put void to say it takes no parameter, otherwise I am asking the compiler to play guessy games based on the first invocation?

There's all sorts of odd fruity behaviours in C that we again avoid by muscle memory.

I also think that many of us will have had some sort of assembler experience before C which preps you for concepts like different integer types, pointers and linear arrays just being a continuous span of memory locations and what not, but I can imagine (even if not recall) how they seem in isolation to beginners without that experience.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

That's indeed nicer. Isn't Blitz also newer than AMOS? AMOS is still quite old school.

Yeah, I believe so.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

A while later there was a DK book series that showed a nicer way. It used the DEF FN keyword to define a function that would run a machine code routine from basic. It didn't include listings of the machine code, just the pokes, but there was some obvious boiler plate bytes in every example. Decoding those showed me how it was getting the variables passed to the declared function from the basic stack. Knowing that, I could write my own assembly routines that could be called from basic as a function. Happy days.

Those would be the "Step By Step" programming guides from Dorling Kindersley. I have all four. The two that introduced m/c routines in DEF FN were books 3 and 4:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/alt/...ics-Book_Three

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/alt/...hics-Book_Four

You can find the PDFs of those on those links.

[Karlos]

Damn! Nostalgia overload.

[Thorham]

These are available for the C64 as well.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Thorham

These are available for the C64 as well.

They're superb and possibly my most treasured computer books. I got so much mileage out of them back in the day.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Dunny

They're superb and possibly my most treasured computer books.

Sadly they don't make them like that anymore

[Karlos]

I had books 3 and 4. I have no idea what happened to them. I still have a ZX Spectrum owners manual though, the original ringbound one with the strange floating cityscape at sunset/sunrise cover.

[Photon]

I think any language helps, but your first language(s) should be 1) simple and 2) educational. BASIC was, in the 1970s.

Simple can mean 3 things: a) limited, b) not limited but low-level (write all the code), c) not limited and written code available, but you must learn a bunch of custom libs which will break and change. a keeps the language simple and easy to learn, while b and c keeps the language simple and hard to learn, and c means you have only custom knowledge about opaque functions, knowledge which is worth nothing and useless to learn.

Early languages also had to be limited to be small in size and leave enough RAM for programs. Some limitations like line numbers also came from something like this; to make the editor smaller and faster. BASIC is BASIC even without line numbers, and most BASICs did have functions of a sort.

I would say languages classed as educational would be a better start; this excludes the C family but includes languages like the Pascal family, Lingo, etc. But BASIC wasn't bad for the 1970s and early 80s. You could do a lot. Some dialects were bad tho, like the C64 BASIC.

[Karlos]

I would suggest that Python fills the gap of simplicity and ease of learning, except that it's not really an option for learning to program on the Amiga.

I think Blitz Basic is probably an OK dialect though, it does support things that prepare you for moving on, like scalar types, structures and pointers and what not and it's not too much of a word salad.

[Daedalus]

Also, to an extent it will depend on whatever reading material and / or tutorials you have. Even BASIC is a steep learning curve if all you have is a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The Usborne BASIC books in the '80s were wonderful learning material and taught me basic, despite the dialect used by my Atari being unsupported and thus incompatible with 80% of the material.

But I also had (and still have) an extremely dry book that does its best to put any aspiring coder off learning even BASIC. It's called Programming Your Atari Computer by Mark Thompson (viewable here), and spends 85 pages lecturing on computer theory, boolean algebra, binary arithmetic and so on before introducing a single command. As a kid, it might have put me off coding if I didn't also have access to the Usborne books in the library.

[Locutus]

This again something that Python actually does quite well. It's entirely possible to learn basic (hah!) programming with nothing but the default Python documentation included with the language.