Progamming in UK Schools

[TESLACOIL]

ref insuring a program does the job properly

Amen to that, user interface design is critical here. A great coder is not much use to their fellow man unless the user interface is up to the job. That goes way past 'bug free' , 'wally proofing' and WYSIWYG design

Why am i still using XP ? ...it works AND i know it well enough to solve most of the problems myself. Even after all these years it still has 1/3rd share of OS

With many devices and systems there is a temptation to cram in so much complexity with so little thought gone into the end user interface and end user needs. Cameras and music synthesizers two examples of poor end products.

[ike]

plenitudinous

[Sigord]

I agree with Basic Coder 2. The beauty of most forms of BASIC is it largely uses plain English easy to understand rather than the gobbledygook of such as C, VB an JavaScript. Therefore as you can see on my site programs written in BBC Basic and the BASICA years ago can fairly easily be converted to other Basics like QB, BBC4Wm LB, JB etc. Once the ' nerdies ' start to corrupt FB to accept C like code it is no longer pure Basic.

Likewise when converting say QB code to FB, what is the sense in having to Define umpteen variables and strings using Dim as if you can avoid it using say #lang "fblite" just to please some sort of nerdy programming etiquette ? It seems much of IT is now riddled with nerdies attempting to make everything as complicated as possible, perhaps just to create ' jobs for the boys '.

[schoolman]

The site is intended to teach topics common to any programming language. In fact, I could use pseudo-code in the examples, but you can't execute pseudo-code, and where's the fun in that? Theory without practice is sterile. So topics will include a semi-formal design methodology, programming paradigms, general purpose algorithms, some AI stuff, low-level techniques, etc, all aimed at the beginning programmer. My agenda isn't to push FB or any other BASIC (whether "pure" or not), but FB fits the bill in that it has a simple syntax and is more readable than the standard curly bracket/semi-colon languages, as well as having both high and low level features.

[TJF]

The site is intended to teach topics common to any programming language. In fact, I could use pseudo-code in the examples, but you can't execute pseudo-code, and where's the fun in that? Theory without practice is sterile. So topics will include a semi-formal design methodology, programming paradigms, general purpose algorithms, some AI stuff, low-level techniques, etc, all aimed at the beginning programmer. My agenda isn't to push FB or any other BASIC (whether "pure" or not), but FB fits the bill in that it has a simple syntax and is more readable than the standard curly bracket/semi-colon languages, as well as having both high and low level features.

I agree with all that. And I realy appreceate your effort to create new examples and documentations.

My concerns are about #LANG "QB" and #LANG "FBLITE". This is deprecated stuff and shouldn't be explained in newly written tutorials. This wastes your time and the time of the readers.

[fxm]

Likewise when converting say QB code to FB, what is the sense in having to Define umpteen variables and strings using Dim as if you can avoid it using say #lang "fblite" just to please some sort of nerdy programming etiquette ? It seems much of IT is now riddled with nerdies attempting to make everything as complicated as possible, perhaps just to create ' jobs for the boys '.

Before working with FreeBASIC, I already no longer was using QuickBasic but Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS:
- It was full compatible with QuickBasic 4.5 (or 7.1).
- In addition to visual designer function and objects usage, it had some useful improvements as:

• - a better editor multi-windows,
  - and the additional directive 'Option Explicit' which forced the explicit declaration of all variables, allowing to see errors at compilation time instead of observe eventual faults (non exhaustive way) at execution time only.

This is where I understood the interest to explicitly declare all variables.

[schoolman]

My concerns are about #LANG "QB" and #LANG "FBLITE". This is deprecated stuff and shouldn't be explained in newly written tutorials. This wastes your time and the time of the readers.

My bad. I had a closer look at the docs on dialects. I had mistakenly assumed that fb is a superset of the others, but that's not the case (e.g. it's not possible to use implicit variables in fb). So yep, I'll take the earlier advice and use fb exclusively. :-)

[TESLACOIL]

We are living in a stupendously complex society. Humans haven't got much smarter, education helps a bit, but the societies we live in are exponentially more complex than were capable of understanding.

Today, students brains are split many ways, smart phones, social media websites, digital cameras, basically every technology and service you can think of, they all take time to learn.

I learned about computers way back, however my brain wasn't split 101 different ways. The world was 10 or perhaps 100x simpler back then.

Today I have a lot of tech gadgets, but i can only use them meekly, i simply dont have enough brain time/power to 'get in to them' and figure out the nuts and bolts. Last count i have 89 devices plugged into the wall, its probably over 100 now. I have dozens of switchable trailing sockets, follow the electrical cord and you are likely to find a black box at the end of it, a black box with a computer chip or three inside. Likewise i have 100x more software programs than i could ever learn well.

Q what to do with one brain in a hyper complex society ?