Thursday, September 14, 2006

It's about computer literacy

David Brin wrote an article about how computer users (kids in particular) need an easy language like BASIC again, and it should come with the computer. Read it all here http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/index.html

I absolutely agree with Mr. Brin's stance. The trouble isn't that there aren't tons of programming languages to choose from, many of them free. The problem is that the computer doesn't come with an easy language. And if it did come out of the box (like DOS had QBasic), it really should be an icon on the desktop. Hiding it away would be a bad thing.

Also the programming culture worships complexity. What the professional programmer today considers easy sets a bar way too high for the child or casually interested adult. The result is that the fun is removed from the experience. No fun = no learning.

Schools today think that computer literacy is about using Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Frontpage. That's a low-minded place to be. Teach kids to program. Some of them will latch onto the experience.

Security?

Scriptman responded to my last post with the following questions:

O.K. point taken, but how do you overcome security issues such as passing "nasty" commands to the interpreter? (yes even Perl has them if scripts are not properly configured.)

This is a very good question. Our web BASIC uses a custom web server with the language engine built right into it. We are trying to be very security minded. We will sandbox each session to prevent improper access to files and to avoid server swamping, processes that fail to terminate, etc.

Another question I have is, will your Basic have a feature to "get" (sorry no pun intended) parameters such as the IP of the client ?Much like the Perl $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR}

We don't have this yet, but I see no reason why it cannot be made available.

Not about Perl. Not about cgi.

Scriptman replied to an earlier post about our web BASIC effort:

What's wrong with PHP and PERL? They are both free and easy to learn.

So I replied to him with the following:

Perl is a useful tool, but let me explain why this is different from what we're doing.

First of all this is about BASIC, not Perl. If you like Perl then that's great. Use it. Enjoy. ;-)

A lot of people know and like BASIC, which is a perfectly useful language. There's no reason why a nice BASIC for the web shouldn't exist.

With Perl you have to manage at least three components. Your web server, your cgi scripts (you write them using a text editor), and to use your programs you use a web browser.What we're doing will allow the BASIC programmer to do everything in the browser. There is no concept of a remote procedure. An application with sophisticated interactive features can exist in one file, written in a very standard desktop app coding style. In other words this is going to be easy. If you think cgi programming with Perl is easy, this is going to be even easier.

Read the original post and comments here:

http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2006/05/web-20-extremely-easy-web-programming.html#comments