I just came across a new BASIC implementation for Google Android application called Simple. You can read about it here:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/07/programming-made-simple.html
Clearly, a lot of time and effort has been recently put into enabling this functionality for Android.
Should the software industry continue to encourage non-programmers into learning BASIC, or are modern languages like C#, Python, Ruby more appropriate at this time?
I don't see any reason for continuing with BASIC. The original BASIC was good because it was a very lightweight language with a minimum amount of constructs consistent with capabilities of machines of the time. It also had built-in graphics primitives, which are a good way to "get something interesting done quickly", and are very useful teaching tools.
Modern BASIC is much more complex, and its syntax is significantly more bloated, and new additions are more often than not inconsistent with core of the language (or, if you prefer to look at it the other way, the core of the language is outdated compared to new constructs that are slapped on top of that).
I believe that today, Python covers all teaching ground that BASIC ever did. And its turtle module is good enough to provide the basic teaching graphics.
I think Basic is a very fine language for non-programmers. You are saying that Python, Ruby and C# are easy ?! really ?!
I don't think that a non-programmer would care about reflection for example. These languages boost the productivity of a programmer. For a non-programmer they are nightmares! With tons of concepts.
I know a lot of friends who learned QBasic in high school very easily and did some really cool stuff with it.
So, yes Basic or its modern descendants are very fine for non-programmers. I find SmallBasic very interesting :)
The language is nowhere near as important as the concepts. Variables, data structures, conditional statements, looping. The language is a tool, a means to understand programs and programming. I'd bet that people here first learned to program in one of maybe a dozen different languages; in half those cases I doubt they write anything in said language any more.
So, sure. BASIC. LOGO. Python. Pascal. C. Java. Assembly. Once you know how to do it in one language, it's so much easier to translate that thinking to other languages, to expand the breadth and depth of languages and of programming styles and methodologies.
Speaking as a 14-year veteran of Visual Basic (going back to VB3): hell no. There are lots of other languages out there that are just as easy for beginners and non-programmers to learn, and they have the advantage of transitioning nicely to more powerful languages.
It's not that BASIC is all that horrible; it's just that some things should be allowed to die.
Alice is a great language for beginners, particularly children.
For adults, functional languages have surprising results. F#, having good support, is a good call.
Visual Basic is not bad, and is widely supported. Being able to do stuff in Excel is a plus for many adults.
If the person intends to become a programmer, and is not a children, I recommend Scala. It has both functional and object oriented paradigms, well balanced, and has a good support structure.
Not that many acknowledge it but there are more microcontrollers sold anually than x86s. I'm not sure about usb mice, but a common implemntations PS2 mice and keyboards both was use an 8 bit micro. If for no other reason than it would be rather silly to put a quad-core pentium in a system that could make due with a part that cost less than a $1. So the application languages running on resource limited systems still exist. Products like the "Basic Stamp" provide a platform for young perspective engineers to experiment with. Basic is nice on these platforms due to the fact you can ROM basic and run a token stream on a system less than 1 k of ram, which is common for products from the company Microchip, manufacture or the PIC microcontrollor family.
Edit: Other than that, I learned BASIC in elementary school. I really don't buy that I would have grasped Python's dependancy on libraries at that age.
Many middle schools and high schools use unstructured basic to programming. These languages (basicA, basicQ) are out of date and focus on programming concepts and modes of thinking which are no longer used. For instance unstructured basic makes use of GOTO statements.
I'd recommend logo for teaching kids as it is designed to keep them interested while teaching them important concepts.
Pete Eddy made an excellent point in the comments that:
"The key is to include "enough" functionality in the language, that they don't need to do things like: "import Blah.foo.bar.and.the.kitchen.sink.* as somethingDifferentEVERYTIME;" because that's just ugly stupid to explain to someone at an age they SHOULD be learning the basics of programming."
Non-programmers should try Lua or DrScheme. Since the 1960's, we have learned a thing or two about teaching programming to non-programmers and other beginners.
"The software industry" doesn't encourage BASIC, and hasn't for a long time. Do you hear anyone demanding that BASIC be put back into ROM on new computers?
Just because someone implements a BASIC for a system doesn't mean that "the software industry" is planning a new crop of BASIC programmers. Just about all languages get ported to just about every platform.
However, there are now and will be many, many jobs for VB (and COBOL, for that matter) legacy maintenance. As long as there is money in it, people will need to learn it. As long as there are parents who learned BASIC as a child, some will want the experience of sitting down with their kids and passing that along. I see no harm and no foul here. For the kids, BASIC lost a long time ago. There are a dozen or more popular languages vying for attention.
I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
--Edsger Dijkstra at the ACM 1984 South Central Region Conference
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Edsger Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
Dijkstra knew a lot more than I do, so I'll take his word for it.
Personally, I think BASIC feels more natural to a kid or someone else just starting out. BASIC can easily be learned by a 6 year old (or at least I thought so at the time).
Here's a quick comparison ... tell me which feels more natural:
Python:
a = 0
while a < 10:
a = a + 1
print a
Basic:
a = 0
do while a < 100
a = a + 1
print a
loop
I might be wrong, but I think the required formatting of python would trip up a kid ... that's one thing I personally HATE about Python. What happens if someone goes through and removes some of your spaces? Oops! Either way though, as long as the teachers aren't suggesting the students use GOTOs everywhere, it is relatively easy to move from BASIC to Python and vice-versa.
The problem is: If you start programming in BASIC, you will continue programming the same way in Java/C#. Like Djikstra said
... teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
No, please don't.
BASIC (even VB) helps people develop a very, very bad procedural / imperative style with long methods and classes.
I think the best combination for beginners would be to teach them F# first and then, to introduce OOP, first the GoF - patterns, then clean coding rules and then C#.
No more bad garbage coding, please. :-(
If you can find enough high school teachers that know other languages, they may be better off. Most students are not going to become progammers, but can use some of the 'basics' to expand the functionality of Office products for example. Financial analysts, accountants, office managers, personal assistants, HR staff, etc. will use Excel. You can't approach this purely from a programmer's point of view. And NO language will prevent bad code.
The English language has a lot of problems and is not the most spoken language, but it is pretty handy.
Any language which is useful for showcasing the fundamentals of computer science is fine to teach the fundamentals of computer science, including BASIC, if what we're talking about is a variant of BASIC which implements object orientation, recursion, referencing and self-referencing, and the essential data structures. Line-numbered BASIC doesn't do that, but Visual Basic and implementations similar to it, like Object Pascal, do.
Beginning programming is not about the nuances of CS; it's appropriate to use a language which hides memory management issues and doesn't force programmers to think about symbol case or even much about scoping.
But even after having said all that, if what we want to do is raise a generation of programmers who automatically think about things like manycore issues before they're juniors at a University, staring with DSL's or F# (I know it's not a DSL) might be just the thing. I don't necessarily agree that C# or any C-based language is a natural endpoint to any of that.
Learning Programming concept and pattern is more important then language.