Re:Microsoft Small Basic
by hetman on Sunday May 14, 2023 @12:20PM
(#35939080)
I doubt that's the case for 8 year olds. C requires a mental model of more hidden abstractions than something like Small Basic (a decent grasp of pointers is kind of non-negotiable). I mean the Array and Stack objects in Small Basic sound like they would be a lot easier to handle for a beginner than anything equivalent in C.
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I once explained arrays and frontbuffers/backbuffers to a 9 year old. I can't say that he did anything useful with the knowledge, though he wasn't put to sleep by it and went away knowing a little more on how graphics are done.
There's quite a bit of a gap between an understanding sufficient to follow someone else's explanation and an understanding sufficient to build something (including learning a rigid syntax understandable to a machine in order to express the concepts).