Re:SmallBasic: "Fun" programming language for beginners
by tuukkah on Friday October 24, 2008 @02:21AM
(#342135)
The intention is good: making a modern, yet simple programming environment for beginners. The result is bad: including GOTO and omitting parameter passing makes programming simple as in assembler, not simple as in helping you do the right thing.
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Re:SmallBasic: "Fun" programming language for beginners
by bdfh42 on Friday October 24, 2008 @04:01AM
(#342179)
I have no idea where this un-natural fear of the goto comes from - I suspect it is a university CS dept. myth. I feel pretty confident that I can write well structured maintainable code in any language that is Turing complete - and this little basic exceeds that requirement and then some.
I can't wait to give it to my young son and see what he can do with it.
Re:SmallBasic: "Fun" programming language for beginners
by tuukkah on Friday October 24, 2008 @11:19AM
(#342422)
I thought I made my point clear: including Goto in this supposedly minimalistic language doesn't guide learners in the right direction (and using it in the examples even less so). Goto is not used in modern programming style even though some specific constructs can be expressed succinctly with it.
Regarding Turing-completeness: Perhaps you can write maintainable code in Intercal or Whitespace, but most people can't or at least don't want to write maintainable code without functions and static scoping.