When I started learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 about twenty five years ago, I learned it because I loved computers and was bored with what my computer could do. I had played all of the games we had for it and wanted to learn how I could write my own. (All of my games sucked. But, the learning process made up for it. At least for me.) The Commodore 64 was such a simple machine. Turn it on and you’ve got a prompt right there, ready to receive your BASIC. A number of magazines had code listings each month, all of which had to be short enough to fit in the magazine, by definition. You could look at the examples, tweak them, make them display in color, whatever. You could write the simplest of programs in just a few lines and gradually build up from there, at whatever speed you felt like.

Kids these days all want to write web applications because the web is Facebook and Google and YouTube and whatever else. What sucks for them though is that to do anything which isn’t completely trivial requires learning so much that, I think, a lot of potential programmers give up before they’ve even gotten a form submission working. There’s not a way to build up slowly. Some of the programming languages like PHP are simple enough, but you also have to learn some HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and maybe some Apache configuration and Linux system administration that. Each one of those categories is at least a month long journey. It’s all a far cry from starting with 10 PRINT “HELLO”; 20 GOTO 10 and moving on from there.

I’m hoping my son will take interest in programming, too, when he gets older. I’ve seen books like Learn to Program (using Ruby) and Learn to Program Using Python. Both books claim they’ll teach you to program using Ruby or Python, both of which are nice enough languages, but both of which are not well suited to a first programming language. Python or Ruby require you to at least scratch the surface of topics like string interpolation, duck typing, and classes and methods. That’s pretty advanced stuff for someone who doesn’t know what a for loop is yet or that the computer will strictly do what you tell it.

I think a perfect first programming language is Logo. It’s graphical, which I think helps motivate you when you’re first learning. Being able to see a visual representation of what your program did isn’t only exciting, but if you do something wrong, the visual difference between what came out and what you expected can often help you figure out what went wrong. Logo is just a stepping stone, but it’s a great one.

For the kids out there wanting to learn to program today, things like Logo are still around, but they’ll probably never know about it. The only reason I knew about BASIC was because the Commodore 64 prompt was staring right in my face, and I wanted to see what I could make it do. Kids these days have a web browser staring back at them, and they want to find a way to make their application fit inside of it.