I’ve never been much of a programmer. I learned some basic DOS shell scripting in the stone age because you basically had to back then. If I’d been 5-10 years older I would have had to learn BASIC to get by, and I’d likely be a bit better for it.
I took C++, COBOL, and Visual Basic at the community college about five stints at college, two majors, and 15 or so years ago. I remember genuinely enjoying COBOL, even though its pretty much limited to record processing. I haven’t done any real coding since, just the odd bash shell script to get by.
But now I’ve got kids…
And they keep dragging me back.
Its important for people, all people. regardless of trade or skill set, to be at least literate in the technology around them. It helps folks prevent themselves from being taken in by tech broligarchs trying to sell them NFTs or AI malarkey.
And so for the sake of my kids I’m going to have to learn some Python, and LOGO, and Scratch.
Scratch is one of those “Code Block” systems that allows kids to assemble code visually like a lego set. Scratch programs manipulate on screen characters and objects to tell little stories. LOGO similarly uses code (or in some cases code blocks) to draw images, you may be more familiar with it as that Turtle drawing program. Both of these will teach the basics of coding, even before my kids have become particularly strong readers, but they both have the downside of not being especially useful as programming languages.
In order to create programs that actually do something I’ll need to teach them a “Real” programming language. I considered BASIC since it’ll run on the ByWater BASIC interpreter I’ve already got installed via dosbox, as well as other interpreters running on Linux. Its definitely the old school approach, but its a bit too old school. I also considered Lua since so many of their favorite games use Lua for writing mods and game content. But Lua is generally limited to only writing extensions. So Python it is!
Back when I was working in tech I always figured I’d spend some time learning Python, and now as an unemployed Horticulturalist what have I got to lose. Why Python? well its widely used, works in lots of odd places, seems to have become the default language for micro-controllers and STEM kits, and most importantly there are lots and lots of free resources to learn it with.
So I’m probably going to start the kids on Scratch while I start myself on Python, we’ll see how it goes.
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