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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

by tkahn6 16y ago

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

cubicle67 16y ago
1. VB.net ain't your daddy's basic 2. I respect Dijkstra, but I think he was wrong on this
- ern 16y ago
  It says a lot about our knowledge about teaching and learning programming that pithy quotes from 35 years ago are still regarded by many as being relevant. I mean, has anyone actually studied the academic outcomes of programmers who started on BASIC or VB, versus those who started on other languages? Has anyone determined if programmers who start out in VB make more errors than programmers who started out in say, assembler, or C, or Python, to any statistically significant degree?
barrydahlberg 16y ago
Undownvoted for being somewhat relevant. We are really talking about different languages though.
bfung 16y ago
I taught myself programming in QBASIC in third grade (gasp, 20 years ago) and my favorite languages now are ocaml and haskell. Doing ruby, python, java, and c#/vb.net at work, all production code. It's the concepts, not the language. ;)
rsaarelm 16y ago
I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town for a decade for home users. I still ended up seeing a lot more skilled programmers get started by early tinkering rather than through dutifully attending a college course in the formal derivation and verification of software constructs after having carefully kept themselves unsullied of writing programs without being absolutely sure what they are doing. There may be a point in the underlying sentiment, but the thing as a whole just rings false in the post-microcomputer age. The big difference might be that the people Dijkstra was thinking of probably had had BASIC taught to them as university students, instead of tinkering with the BASIC repl of the 8-bit microcomputer they got their hands on as 9-year olds.

by tkahn6 16y ago

cubicle67 16y ago

1. VB.net ain't your daddy's basic 2. I respect Dijkstra, but I think he was wrong on this

ern 16y ago
It says a lot about our knowledge about teaching and learning programming that pithy quotes from 35 years ago are still regarded by many as being relevant. I mean, has anyone actually studied the academic outcomes of programmers who started on BASIC or VB, versus those who started on other languages? Has anyone determined if programmers who start out in VB make more errors than programmers who started out in say, assembler, or C, or Python, to any statistically significant degree?

barrydahlberg 16y ago

Undownvoted for being somewhat relevant. We are really talking about different languages though.

bfung 16y ago

I taught myself programming in QBASIC in third grade (gasp, 20 years ago) and my favorite languages now are ocaml and haskell. Doing ruby, python, java, and c#/vb.net at work, all production code. It's the concepts, not the language. ;)

rsaarelm 16y ago

I've always found this quote (apparently originally from 1975) somewhat strange, having grown up in 1980s, when BASIC was pretty close to the only game in town for a decade for home users. I still ended up seeing a lot more skilled programmers get started by early tinkering rather than through dutifully attending a college course in the formal derivation and verification of software constructs after having carefully kept themselves unsullied of writing programs without being absolutely sure what they are doing. There may be a point in the underlying sentiment, but the thing as a whole just rings false in the post-microcomputer age. The big difference might be that the people Dijkstra was thinking of probably had had BASIC taught to them as university students, instead of tinkering with the BASIC repl of the 8-bit microcomputer they got their hands on as 9-year olds.