Subj : Re: Is BASIC to be regarded as less than reputable prog lang?
To   : Bob Worm
From : tenser
Date : Mon Jul 15 2024 03:11:06

On 14 Jul 2024 at 02:14p, Bob Worm pondered and said...
 
 BW> My wife taught in a primary school for a few years and I think the
 BW> general "background" level of technology comfort had got to the point
 BW> where the least technology literate were easily showing very young
 BW> children how to draw things with the "roamer" bot. I think that was a
 BW> self-contained educational version of a Big Trak, though, rather than
 BW> being connected to a computer. I imagine that would be thought of as
 BW> arcane now, nearly 20 years on.

Yeah, the situation now is undoubtedly better.  On the flip side,
just drawing a triangle on the screen isn't going to impress anyone
anymore.

A lot of the physical computing stuff, where you get a small robot
to walk around a grid on the floor or something, or you interact
with some kind of sensor or something, seems to be the way forward.

 BW> You seem to know a lot about this, I assume you must either be in or
 BW> have some strong association with computer science in academia?

I'm actually not a computer scientist; I was trained as a
mathematician.  But I am a working software engineer, and I
have a lot of contacts in both academia and industrial
research, though in the systems space.  I try to attend at
least one academic conference a year to keep abreast of what's
going on on that side of the house, and occasionally drop into
Hackers or something more off-beat to keep up with the other
side.

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