Designed to teach kids how to computer

>designed to teach kids how to computer
>doesn't have built-in BASIC
>doesn't have any inherent interest even to kids who might want to computer
>only used by NEETs for seed boxes

Is this thing the blunder of the decade?

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>seed boxes
Jokes on you, mine has been idling for around 8 months on a completely fresh Raspbian install

the official image come with Python which is about as easy as BASIC

>BASIC
We don't live in 1985 amigo

it's pronounced AMIGA, faggot

No kids want to learn BASIC.

Wouldn't this all open up a legal can of worms? I think ARM still hold the rights to a version of BASIC that came with the Acorn PCs, so they'd be able to integrate it quite easily, legally speaking.

Same here, but I'm up to over a year already.

B-but it has Scratch

BASIC doesn't have any licensing.
And pretty much every home computer had its own implementation - not just Acorn's

>wants a rPi or similar single boardcomputer
>gets it
>wtf do i use this for... even old laptops are faster

baywater basic is just a 'sudo apt-get install bwbasic' away user.

TITS OR GTFO

You want user

Now would you kindly leave?

No one ever "learns BASIC."

You play around with it for a while then actually learn something useful.

"My" first computer was my Dad's C64 which he let me fuck around with once he got a new one.

Once I got it doing pretty colors and drawing shapes I wanted to start doing real things.

Yes you could write software and games in it, but unless you were writing homebrew you never would. An early version of Elite was written in BASIC.

It's a great introductory language for young people.

See OP. It's meant to be an educational tool.

My uni uses them for robotics projects.

>Is this thing the blunder of the decade?
no

I got a first gen B, installed retrofit and haven't used it since.

How long is that?

>teach kids how to computer
>BASIC
These are mutually exclusive things

Use it for robotics.

7. THE STORY OF BYWATER BASIC

This program was originally begun in 1982 by my grandmother, Mrs.
Verda Spell of Beaumont, TX. She was writing the program using
an ANSI C compiler on an Osborne I CP/M computer and although my
grandfather (Lockwood Spell) had bought an IBM PC with 256k of
RAM my grandmother would not use it, paraphrasing George Herbert
to the effect that "He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k."
She had used Microsoft BASIC and although she had nothing against
it she said repeatedly that she didn't understand why Digital
Research didn't "sue the socks off of Microsoft" for version 1.0
of MSDOS and so I reckon that she hoped to undercut Microsoft's
entire market and eventually build a new software empire on
the North End of Beaumont. Her programming efforts were cut
tragically short when she was thrown from a Beaumont to Port
Arthur commuter train in the summer of 1986. I found the source
code to bwBASIC on a single-density Osborne diskette in her knitting
bag and eventually managed to have it all copied over to a PC
diskette. I have revised it slightly prior to this release. You
should know, though, that I myself am an historian, not a programmer.

This. David Braben and Ian Bell never made anything good.

>she was thrown from a [...] train

Haha! What?

BASIC is quicker though. Nearly instant, in fact.

The Pi is not a fast machine.

There is a 3MB RISC OS image that's pretty much just BASIC and it boots just as fast as you'd expect, and fills the screen.

You'd struggle to make a Python-based solution to this as readily* available as the BASIC one, because everything is so much smaller.

*as in to be ready quickly

Anyone have the webm of the collection of raspi pi with necko covered allbof then ?

>doesn't have any built-in BASIC
The BASIC of the 21st century is Python, user.

Chances are anything your children end up making in Python will not be so demanding in performance that it will actually make a Raspberry Pi break a sweat. By the way, it can also use Node.js, which is probably going to be faster than any BASIC flavor you're used to.

>node.js faster than anything

>The “scripting” languages that serve as entry-level tools for today’s aspiring programmers — like Perl and Python — don’t make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways.

You can run near full OS images on the Pi, Python is no problem for it at all.

>he didn't sudo apt-get update first
oh dear, you seem to have blundered.

Eu amo this board!

The difference is that for Python to be present the computer needs to be doing things already. With BASIC the computer is doing "nothing" until you tell it to.

As a teaching tool that's important.

>full OS images

That's the point I've been making though. You need a full OS behind Python in a way you don't for BASIC.

Schools don't even use BASIC for learning to program anymore, let alone for general use. Python is much more relevant in current year. You don't even need to use that though. My 6 year old self would have turned japanese for one of these in the 80's.

...

You do know that Python runs on RISC OS, right?

I have a project to make a robot dog

I think what he wants is an image which loads into basic and nothing else. He apparently thinks older machines didn't run an OS, which is untrue. They had a tiny OS in ROM so it was still doing something and not nothing which he claims.

Not true nothing is impossible, if you have to be taught programming you are mentally mutilated to begin with.

The first two Ultima Games were written in BASIC.

Nothing was in inverted commas.
>With BASIC the computer is doing "nothing" until you tell it
>"nothing"

Must've been hell to write.

BASIC is such an unstructured language, all it's meant to do is teach the BASICs of computer programming.

Which I suppose settles OP's issue.

>With BASIC the computer is doing "nothing" until you tell it to.
Except for every other process on the machine.

>this is what retarded kikes actually believe

>meant to be an educational tool
"Please learn the inner workings of this computer slower than laptops from a decade ago"

if you used the C64 its BASIC was so bad that you pretty much had to write machine code using DATA statements

so yes you did learn a lot about computers

Any news on this going on sale for black friday/cyber monday?

>designed to teach kids how to computer
>>doesn't have built-in BASIC
This should be BBC Micro.

This guy knows

it's too slow for web browsing. i use mine for movies(kodi), and that's about it

The original Ultima, as well a good number of Srategic Simulations inc's used BASIC for the primary code.

It's an absolute shit idea for kids.

RPi is for shit as a learning computer.

As a micro PC it's pretty decent though.

t. rpi fag

plenty of ordinary people used basic all the time

shit in the 1980s computer magazines were filled with basic software

you're a child?

this

also the Apple II series had excellent built-in features for assembly language programming as well, you could mix it with basic without issue

they don't really teach kids assembly any more except maybe on some idealized model machine

People who use BASIC are permanently damaged.

Pascal is the superior beginner language.

Let's all admit that Forth is ideal for beginners.

I thought so too. I played around with BASIC on my dads atari and even copied games from magazines, but Pascal made it look like something retarded cavemen used.

>BASIC is quicker though. Nearly instant, in fact.

>Apple II series had excellent built-in features for assembly language programming as well

Acorn's computers did as well.

That's why it's an educational tool.

>what it context?

Seriously read the rest of the post.
>There is a 3MB RISC OS image that's pretty much just BASIC and it boots just as fast as you'd expect
>You'd struggle to make a Python-based solution to this as readily* available
>*as in to be ready quickly

Havent found any English Reference so quickly;
>Das „Pi“ steht für „Python interpreter“, ursprünglich sollte der Rechner mit fest eingebautemInterpreterfür die ProgrammiersprachePythongeliefert werden, ähnlich wie bei den Heimcomputern der 1980er-Jahre fast durchweg einBASIC-Interpreter eingebaut war.[5]

de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

>Acorn's computers did as well.
That's neat, I am going to run RiscOS on my Pi here one of these days and see what British computing's all about.

>With BASIC the computer is doing "nothing" until you tell it to.
>not making your own rudimentary multitasking environment in your main loop
Why couldn't you do this if you wanted to?

Interesting, didn't know that. But I think Python is a bit overkill for actual kids.

Are you familiar with the concept of a "bodge"? Because that's RISC-OS.

I mean, it's great in a lot of ways. Like it boots lightning fast, which is really cool to see such a tiny machine load a full desktop in single-digit seconds.

But then there's things like how shit it is at screen resolutions (I've found, at least), how the separator for a director isn't "/" but "." and it's VERY mouse driven, which goes both ways.

You need a three-button mouse because all three are used for different things based on context.

Who doesn't have a 3 button mouse in 2016?

Oh wait, Apple doesn't.

>Who doesn't have a 3 button mouse in 2016?

Who did in the early 90s?

That's the question you'd be better to ask.

I've actually no experience whatsoever with any British computers except the ZX-81, which of course is also a bodge. I got it from my wife's grandmother's estate, and haven't really played with it much. Horrid keyboard on that poor thing.

AFAIK RiscOS is/was the closest thing going to a British try at a modern OS and I have always been curious to see what it was like just for shits and giggles. I finally have Raspbian tuned the way I like it, and have managed to completely remove all traces of systemd and gone back to init, but sticking a different microsd card in there is easy.

A smalltalk-oriented distro (boot straight into your squeak vm) would be nice and educational for kids as well. There are many ways the Pi could be improved, and almost all of them are software solutions. As it stands now it's just like any other computer, that's its downfall. At least the OLPC people went out on a limb and created some more interesting software-based solutions to computer assisted learning.

I have an OLPC XO-1.5 and I really like it, it's a nice little machine and that screen is really difficult to beat even today. Shit keyboard but I can see why, it's meant to be splash / rain resistant

It's an awful idea and does nothing to teach them concepts about how computers actually work. In the future we won't even be able to create new architectures because nobody will be able to bring a new one up.

We're completely fucked unless we change things.

>mfw you dumb kids wasn't into assembly language

>blunder of the decade
>sold tens of millions of chips

really makes you think

>justin bieber, daddy jankie, don omar, tupac
it "really" makes you think...

good point. successful people tend to make losers cry about them on the internet.

tupac was a gift from god
youtube.com/watch?v=dkqTM4K68ME

t. serb

Which is why I always recommend starting with C as a first language. You can learn the basics over a weekend, and you are actually forced to develop some understanding about what's going on under the hood.

tupac is a nigger and you are a nigger

CIA* NIGGER

It was made to be functional. If you want to "computer", there's a million dirt cheap dev boards out there you can buy that will teach you all you ever wanted to know about embedded development.

> smalltalk-oriented
what?