Off-Topic > Off-Topic - Tiny Core Lounge
Recommendations for a 14 years old intelligent boy: where can he start in PCs?
Rich:
Hi Lee
--- Quote ---Oh, that is -so- 1970's! ...and that seemingly pitiful little dribble of eprom space is room for a lot of progam in assembly.
--- End quote ---
Considering that many operations have to pass through the accumulator, and the limited choice of
instructions, it can fill pretty fast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIC_microcontroller#Instruction_set and
scroll down to 12-bit PIC instruction set to see.
Lee:
Well now. Back on topic...
I did it. I introduced the twelve-year-olds and the ten-year-old to the fine art of computer programming using...
( go ahead and flame me, I can take it! )
BASIC (*)
I had thought to use vice.tcz and start with C64 BASIC because I still have all the references for it and because it insists that every line be numbered. The line numbers were the primary reason I chose BASIC - I felt that, for a beginner, having each line labeled with a (sequential) line number and the flow of execution closely tied to the sequence of line numbers would make it much easier to get a handle on all of the iteration, branching and subroutines (all of the flow-of-control).
Alas, vice.tce is not yet in the 4.x repo so I had to settle for smallbasic. Of course, I -don't- have all the references for smallbasic and line labels -aren't- required, -don't- have to be numeric nor even, if numeric labels are used, do they have to be in sequential order! That certainly makes it harder to see the advantage of using BASIC, but I have to admit that, other than for the complete novice, smallbasic is a much nicer BASIC than the C64 one.
Anyhow the kids have now got an inkling of the concepts of I/O, branching logic, iteration and simple data structures. But that's not the best part...
They're -excited- about it! That one thing is what makes me think I've done something right. This is going to be fun.
The next steps will be to just let them run wild with small basic for a few days, maybe learn about file i/o. Then we can start on a simple application - probably a data storage and retrieval tool ("database" is too big a word for what I have in mind).
Floppy, have you talked with the neighbor boy? Found out what his interests are? How much he already knows - or thinks he knows - about PCs?
Lee
(*) Hey, I could have picked Mumps! I seriously considered that (but only for about 5 seconds). :)
Lee:
It never hurts (well, usually not) to just try stuff. I brought over vice.tcz and alsa-oss.tcz from the 3.x repo and vice seems to work. Now I have to decide if it is worth fooling with it at this point.
Rich:
Hi Lee
There's nothing wrong with BASIC for what you are doing. Programming concepts tend to be
language agnostic.
Lee:
Thanks for those encouraging words, Rich.
You're right of course that the concepts are independent of the language. Yet I'm kind afraid they'll fall in love with their first programming language and/or develop the bad habits that are so easy to develop in BASIC. Not that they couldn't develop bad habits in other language... to counterfeit another phrase: "A real non-programmer can write BASIC code in any language".
Lee
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