Python is the new BASIC • Hacker News Board

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#61

Post by tacone » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #46

bite_victim wrote: post #26

> PHP is not the new BASIC. Combine the HTML/CSS/JavaScript arguments above, and throw in setting up Apache and a thoroughly bloated namespace. PHP is a poor candidate. Yes, we hate PHP. Hurrr! It is so hard to setup Apache to run it especially considering how easy it is for Python. OH, and yes, PHP doesn't have a CLI! PHP is only good for web because I say so. What? PHP does have a CLI? It is in fact the same proces…

This is the one lesson of PHP that seems to be ignored by a lot (most?) new languages. If you want your language to be popular with beginning web programmers, then provide system administrators with a dead simple way to install it. Add package, done. Then make sure it doesn't cause too much trouble or at least upgrades easily. If it takes almost no effort to install your language and any modules that users might need…

Actually is not just about easiness, rather than safeness.

PHP historically did not come with a disposable webserver, and writing one was hard. All the focus was on stateless applications. So while the smart guys were dealing with the memory leaks of their wonderful engineered systems, PHP monkeys were able to get things done with almost no fear to bring down the server.

I remember reading that Aaron Swartz used to go to bed with his laptop in order to be able to quickly restore Reddit in the case it crashed during the night. [Citation needed]

For hosting companies of the time, the choice of the language was pretty obvious. Most of them have policies of automatically killing long-running processes even nowadays.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#62

Post by phkahler » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

The link in TFA to his book is borked.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#63

Post by lttlrck » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

BASIC was more than just the BASIC language (which wasn't particular good), it was the environment and integration with the hardware that made it a successful springboard for countless developers.

Being built into home micros was part of it, but it also included built-in switching video modes, drawing, audio, I/O, even inline assembler (not in all variants, but certainly the better ones). This creates a very effective and accessible learning curve.

Javascript is the closest modern equivalent - but the language and it's API's are too complex. A browser-based BASIC (compiling to Javascript of course), exposing all the above in a sane synchronous manner would be interesting.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#64

Post by moistgorilla » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:20 PM UTC

anentropic wrote: post #57

david927 wrote: post #13

Yesterday I had to explain to my 9-year-old daughter that the bug in her Python script was due to the fact that she indented with a tab and not four spaces. Trying to publish her program so that her friends could use it was a nightmare (it's a console app). It's 2015 and we have the brightest minds working on this stuff and it's all shit.

it's 2015 and you're still using the wrong editor

What? He doesn't even mention anywhere in his comment what editor he is using

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#65

Post by woah » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

impostervt wrote: post #2

As a javascript fan, console.log("Hello World") seems pretty simple. Sure, when you get into async it might confuse young kids (or experienced programmers), but most beginner stuff won't need callbacks.

Heh, callbacks seem to confuse experienced programmers more than they confuse little kids.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#66

Post by moistgorilla » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

scriptproof wrote: post #36

megaman22 wrote: post #23

Very true. It probably can't happen for various reasons, but I would love if windows just folded python 3.2 in as part of the default install. Python certainly feels, to me, like the most similar language to the old QBasic. Simple syntax, with advanced features that you can use, or not use, pretty robust standard library, not great, but usable IDE built-in (I assume IDLE still comes in the install?) One of the really…

Maybe Python has all these qualities, but it is - different -. If you learn programming with Python, you have to relearn it again to use any other common language, Java, C#, JavaScript etc...

You have to do that with almost every language (not including Java to C# or vice versa)

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#67

Post by kawa » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #51

ZitchDog wrote: post #14

Nope, sorry. Python is an easy, good language. Basic was not popular because it was easy, or even good, it was popular because it was everywhere. JavaScript, for all its warts and foibles, is the new basic. It's easy enough, and it's everywhere.

There is no new BASIC. BASIC was the de facto operating system for most personal computers. You would turn it on and you'd be presented with BASIC. There's just nothing like that today. Computers today keep regular users as far away from programming as possible.

The browser is the "de facto operating system" for the web and javascript is its programming language. Javascript really is the new BASIC...

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#68

Post by jawns » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #33

ZitchDog wrote: post #14

Nope, sorry. Python is an easy, good language. Basic was not popular because it was easy, or even good, it was popular because it was everywhere. JavaScript, for all its warts and foibles, is the new basic. It's easy enough, and it's everywhere.

Probably the best point here by far. I didn't start learning to program because I wanted to program, I learned to program because I saw a file called GORILLA.BAS in one of the folders on my MS-DOS machine. Once I figured out I could open it in QBASIC and just press F5.... that was it... I would be a programmer for my next 20+ years and counting. EDIT: I would also like to point out how important the QBASIC IDE was as…

My experience almost exactly mirrors yours. When I was in grade school, there was a shared computer in the hallway outside the eighth-grade classroom, and if the teachers trusted you enough, you could stay in and use it instead of going outside for recess. A few buddies and I would congregate around the PC and play Gorillas. And once we figured out how to edit the source code and do weird things with gravity, or cause tremendous banana explosions, we were hooked! (And, I think several of us went on to become programmers.) It was kind of like the thrill you'd get when you used Game Genie on an NES game for the first time.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#69

Post by euroclydon » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:26 PM UTC

Professional developers are permanently scarred by software environment configuration tooling. It's to the point that when I decide to pick up a new language or technology stack, I dread researching or even picking a way to get my environment set up, dependencies resolved, and my code built and deployed. And it's not because the tooling is bad, but just that there is so much of it, and it's continually being re-written to add marginally new value.

Beginners benefit from there being a single way of doing things. Competing tooling just leads new developers to waste time early in their careers writing even more tooling, or writing a bunch of scripts and blogs to talk about how they dealt with tooling.

Tooling in JS is going to discourage some potential developers. It's not that bad in Python.

Re: Python is the new BASIC

#70

Post by danielrpa » Fri, Jul 31, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

arturhoo wrote: post #56

As a Data Visualization enthusiast, I can say that Processing [0] is a great candidate for an introductory language to introduce programming (and computer science in general). It is a less verbose subset and superset of Java at the same time, has a solid IDE providing great visual feedback as the code changes and you can introduce real, physical world concepts through classes, polymorphism and what not in a way that…

+1 For Processing. I was talking to a friend about that the other day and used this very same phrase "Processing is the new Basic".

You can't talk about the joy of learning computers without having a very, very easy way to produce simple graphics. Processing delivers on that, it doesn't even require a main().