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BASIC

I was scrolling the intra-webs last night while the better half was wrapping up class when I came across something from my past.  I was searching the trending repositories on Github for fun when I ran across a collection of BASIC computer games1. I opened the bowling game directory and instantly recognized it.  Even thought I discovered it trending on Github, the fella that created it is one of the few tech writers I actually subscribe to in my feed reader.  In his post on Coding Horror2, he mentions the first book I ever got on computers and how this book was the first on computers to reach a million copies have more circulation than actual computers.  

In order to determine the exact year last night, I had to first determine when the Atari 2600 Pac-Man3 was released.  It was released in 1982 and I went with my parents to Dutch Square mall in in Columbia, South Carolina to get a copy.  I remember having to stand in line at the store to get it.  In that same mall just down the way, there was a bookstore next to a record shop and down the way from an arcade.  My parents would give me a little bit of money to spent there and it was there that I picked up some of the most influential things on me as a kid. I got a copy of School is Hell, Cerebus the Aardvark, and most pertinent to this essay… More Basic Computer Games4. 

I got the book in 1983 after I managed to talked my parents into getting a computer. We got an Apple II which was also partially spurred on by the movie War Games which I’ve previously written about in Shall We Play A Game5. I spent countless hours typing those BASIC games into the computer.  As a third or fourth grader, I didn’t even understand what I was entering. It seemed like magic to me but I gradually started to understand what was going on enough so that I was soon making my own games. Looking at the code now reminds me of exactly how important it was to learn those fundamentals. 

Although I really didn’t dig into programming until late into college, all of the elements of programming were there in those games… commands, functions, loops, conditionals, operators, types, and variables.  I was at an in-laws house over the holiday talking with a young kid who must have been about third grade or so who was telling me he really wanted to learn computers. I went out to the car and got my iPad to load up Swift Playgrounds6 which I had started tinkering with. I could tell he was hooked immediately.  

When folks ask me about teaching programming to their kids, I recommend Swift Playgrounds because it teaches the fundamental of programming in a way that has incremental steps, immediate feedback, and playful results7.  I enjoyed it so much, that I’ve gone through much of the Learn to Code, Starting Points, and Challenges just for fun. Discovering that code repository last night was a friendly reminder that everything is incremental knowledge, it’s never too soon to learn, and it’s never too late to have fun. The goal of the repo is to transcribe them all to other programming languages by the end of 2022 and I might contribute for fun. 

  1. Basic Computer Games – https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games
  2. Jeff Atwood – Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era – https://blog.codinghorror.com/updating-the-single-most-influential-book-of-the-basic-era/
  3. Pac-Man ( Atari 2600 ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600) 
  4. David Ahl – Basic Computer Games – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games
  5. Shall We Play A Game? – https://davidawindham.com/shall-we-play-a-game/
  6. Swift Playgrounds – https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ 
  7. Teaching Code – https://www.apple.com/education/k12/teaching-code/