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> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BA

> great learning language E.W.Dijkstra would disagree: "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."

freehunter 7y ago
Has there ever, in the history of learning, been a subject like that? A subject so damaging that it forever ruined anyone who learned it? Or maybe Dijkstra was wrong.
- jl6 7y ago
  Probably just hyperbolic. Bad habits are a common complaint in music and sports education too. Not insurmountable, but not helpful, and it must be frustrating as a teacher to have to unteach bad habits.
- kragen 7y ago
  Christian theology was historically a great impediment to learning about physics; some Christian cults continue to impede people from learning about biology. People who are really good at manipulating other people seem to have a hard time learning to do productive things, maybe because it's too easy to manipulate other people to do them instead, but maybe because people sometimes follow the Law of Attraction, where you make wishful thinking come true by believing in it hard enough, while software and Volkswagen engines do, if anything, the opposite. More broadly, I think any field of learning carries with it a sort of implicit value system: we consider things x and y centrally important, while things a and b are inconsequential details. Much of learning a field involves internalizing these values to the point where you apply them automatically without even being aware that there's an alternative. But often they are suboptimal or even counterproductive in a different field. Volkswagen engines don't care about paint color or whether your grandfather just died, but they do care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances and not making mistakes. Interior decorating doesn't care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances or clean abstractions, but it does care about paint color and whether your grandfather just died. Debugging software doesn't care about not making mistakes or paint color, but it does care about clean abstractions. This is even true in subfields within the same field: real-time engine control software cares about memory allocation in a way that seems completely insane to anyone who programs in Python, for example. BASIC tends to reward novice programmers for banging on a piece of code cluelessly until they get it to work in some cases. Dijkstra, by contrast, believed that what was important was having sufficient logical understanding of the program's space of possible behaviors that you could be sure it would work even before testing it; he in fact designed and successfully taught an introduction-to-computer-programming course that used no actual computers. It's unsurprising that someone who had internalized BASIC's value system would be extremely resistant to Dijkstra's preferred approach, and that Dijkstra's disciples would be extremely resistant to the BASIC approach, even though in fact they are complementary, and each one works best for some classes of problems, so those who are best at one of these ways of working are those who would gain the most from learning the other.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
to me, that was always a great example of the difference between IT and CS. I totally understand how someone trained in VB was "mutilated" for CS. Because the priorities for CS coding are totally different than for commercial coding. But from an IT perspective the point of programming is to be profitable, not perfect. VB allowed people to write profitable programs quickly. It was a fantastic environment if all you wanted to do was write desktop applications for businesses.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I totally understand how someone trained in VB was "mutilated" for CS The quote isn't about VB; its from 1975, VB was released in 1991.
  - marcus_holmes 7y ago
    The quote is about BASIC. Visual Basic is a variant of BASIC. The quote was also thrown around a lot in the late 90's as a "VB sucks, you should use a real programming language" comment in the usual language flame wars.
bluedino 7y ago
You could say the same about (early) php.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> E.W.Dijkstra would disagree Yes. And Dijkstra would be wrong. (Or, perhaps more accurately, prone to somewhat bombastic hyperbole.) BASIC is structurally similar to ASM, moreso than is any other HLL, at least of any popularity. Like almost any language (or paradigm) it is possible to get stuck in its particular ruts, and when BASIC was at its peak popularity there were probably lots of people stuck in those ruts just as later happened with Java and the static, class-based OO paradigm more generally. A learning language isn't something you stock with exclusively, it's something you learn with and then diversify from, ideally, and for that, BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative BASIC) is great.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative) is structured as the "ASM" language for an old-school desk calculator from the 1960s, with a few tacked-on features around string manipulation, input handling etc. plus more, depending on the hardware. It was fine for what it was in the 1960s (a simplified "scripting"-focused version of FORTRAN), but the needs of even slightly more modern coding are very different, and BASIC would not serve them well.
untog 7y ago
IMO it depends what you mean by “good programming”. An Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of VBA macros is by absolutely no means graceful programming or beautiful programming but it’s highly effective and has served as an entry to the world of programming for a huge number of people, myself included. It’s productive programming with little of the bikeshedding you’ll find in much less “mentally mutilated” setups.
badsectoracula 7y ago
When Dijkstra wrote that quote in 1975 he didn't had Visual Basic in mind, he was thinking the much older BASIC dialects that used line numbers and GOTOs for flow control. Dijkstra was trying to promote structured programming languages like Algol and Visual Basic is based on the QBasic dialect which has full structured programming features like WHILE and FOR loops, IF that would work with compound statements (that is have the THEN part be more than a single command), local variables, functions, recursion, etc. It might be hard to image nowadays but there was a time when those weren't available to all languages. Though note that the next year after Dijkstra wrote that quote, the original Dartmouth BASIC actually got structured features. Though it wouldn't be until QBasic that you'd see a (popular) BASIC dialect having those in home computers. Regardless, this quote was outdated long before Visual Basic 1 was made, let alone VB6.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you have in mind but in the 1975 dialects of BASIC the code was something like 10 REM Grab input 20 GOSUB 1000 30 IF VALUE=BAR THEN GOTO 100 40 IF VALUE=BAZ THEN GOTO 200 50 IF VALUE=BLA THEN GOTO 300 60 GOTO 20 100 REM Bar stuff 110 blahblah 199 RESUME 200 REM Baz stuff 210 blahblah 299 RESUME 300 REM Bla stuff 310 blahblah 399 RESUME 1000 REM Code that grabs input 1010 blahblah 1100 RESUME Or just here is some actual BASIC game: https://github.com/peteri/ClassicBasic/blob/master/Games/king.bas https://github.com/peteri/ClassicBasic/blob/master/Games/kin... Note that this is a bit more readable than what people worked with since now you have syntax highlighting. I'm not sure where tail calls enter in the picture... there wasn't even support for functions, at best you had GOSUB/RESUME which was essentially assembly-like CALL/RET.
jpindar 7y ago
He was talking about the old BASICs with line numbers, GOTOs, all global variables, and no functions or really any structures.
jkingsbery 7y ago
Certainly, the next few years of my learning to program was unlearning ideas I had developed from coding in Visual Basic. But it gave me the start in understanding how functions work, how sub-procedures work, and how objects work. More importantly though, Visual Basic gavve me the excitement and possibility that I could make this thing on my family's desk do pretty much whatever I wanted. And Visual Basic made that very accessible.

freehunter 7y ago

Has there ever, in the history of learning, been a subject like that? A subject so damaging that it forever ruined anyone who learned it? Or maybe Dijkstra was wrong.

jl6 7y ago
Probably just hyperbolic. Bad habits are a common complaint in music and sports education too. Not insurmountable, but not helpful, and it must be frustrating as a teacher to have to unteach bad habits.
kragen 7y ago
Christian theology was historically a great impediment to learning about physics; some Christian cults continue to impede people from learning about biology. People who are really good at manipulating other people seem to have a hard time learning to do productive things, maybe because it's too easy to manipulate other people to do them instead, but maybe because people sometimes follow the Law of Attraction, where you make wishful thinking come true by believing in it hard enough, while software and Volkswagen engines do, if anything, the opposite. More broadly, I think any field of learning carries with it a sort of implicit value system: we consider things x and y centrally important, while things a and b are inconsequential details. Much of learning a field involves internalizing these values to the point where you apply them automatically without even being aware that there's an alternative. But often they are suboptimal or even counterproductive in a different field. Volkswagen engines don't care about paint color or whether your grandfather just died, but they do care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances and not making mistakes. Interior decorating doesn't care about thousandth-of-an-inch tolerances or clean abstractions, but it does care about paint color and whether your grandfather just died. Debugging software doesn't care about not making mistakes or paint color, but it does care about clean abstractions. This is even true in subfields within the same field: real-time engine control software cares about memory allocation in a way that seems completely insane to anyone who programs in Python, for example. BASIC tends to reward novice programmers for banging on a piece of code cluelessly until they get it to work in some cases. Dijkstra, by contrast, believed that what was important was having sufficient logical understanding of the program's space of possible behaviors that you could be sure it would work even before testing it; he in fact designed and successfully taught an introduction-to-computer-programming course that used no actual computers. It's unsurprising that someone who had internalized BASIC's value system would be extremely resistant to Dijkstra's preferred approach, and that Dijkstra's disciples would be extremely resistant to the BASIC approach, even though in fact they are complementary, and each one works best for some classes of problems, so those who are best at one of these ways of working are those who would gain the most from learning the other.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

to me, that was always a great example of the difference between IT and CS. I totally understand how someone trained in VB was "mutilated" for CS. Because the priorities for CS coding are totally different than for commercial coding. But from an IT perspective the point of programming is to be profitable, not perfect. VB allowed people to write profitable programs quickly. It was a fantastic environment if all you wanted to do was write desktop applications for businesses.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I totally understand how someone trained in VB was "mutilated" for CS The quote isn't about VB; its from 1975, VB was released in 1991.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  The quote is about BASIC. Visual Basic is a variant of BASIC. The quote was also thrown around a lot in the late 90's as a "VB sucks, you should use a real programming language" comment in the usual language flame wars.

bluedino 7y ago

You could say the same about (early) php.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> E.W.Dijkstra would disagree Yes. And Dijkstra would be wrong. (Or, perhaps more accurately, prone to somewhat bombastic hyperbole.) BASIC is structurally similar to ASM, moreso than is any other HLL, at least of any popularity. Like almost any language (or paradigm) it is possible to get stuck in its particular ruts, and when BASIC was at its peak popularity there were probably lots of people stuck in those ruts just as later happened with Java and the static, class-based OO paradigm more generally. A learning language isn't something you stock with exclusively, it's something you learn with and then diversify from, ideally, and for that, BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative BASIC) is great.

zozbot234 7y ago
BASIC (old-school unstructured imperative) is structured as the "ASM" language for an old-school desk calculator from the 1960s, with a few tacked-on features around string manipulation, input handling etc. plus more, depending on the hardware. It was fine for what it was in the 1960s (a simplified "scripting"-focused version of FORTRAN), but the needs of even slightly more modern coding are very different, and BASIC would not serve them well.

untog 7y ago

IMO it depends what you mean by “good programming”. An Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of VBA macros is by absolutely no means graceful programming or beautiful programming but it’s highly effective and has served as an entry to the world of programming for a huge number of people, myself included. It’s productive programming with little of the bikeshedding you’ll find in much less “mentally mutilated” setups.

badsectoracula 7y ago

When Dijkstra wrote that quote in 1975 he didn't had Visual Basic in mind, he was thinking the much older BASIC dialects that used line numbers and GOTOs for flow control. Dijkstra was trying to promote structured programming languages like Algol and Visual Basic is based on the QBasic dialect which has full structured programming features like WHILE and FOR loops, IF that would work with compound statements (that is have the THEN part be more than a single command), local variables, functions, recursion, etc. It might be hard to image nowadays but there was a time when those weren't available to all languages. Though note that the next year after Dijkstra wrote that quote, the original Dartmouth BASIC actually got structured features. Though it wouldn't be until QBasic that you'd see a (popular) BASIC dialect having those in home computers. Regardless, this quote was outdated long before Visual Basic 1 was made, let alone VB6.

zozbot234 7y ago
GOTO for flow control is not that bad, it's just a tail call after all. The real damage is things like having everything be global variables. But part of that was a technical limitation, as things like "proper" call stacks and reentrant code as the default still had plenty of overhead, and even FORTRAN didn't support them.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you have in mind but in the 1975 dialects of BASIC the code was something like 10 REM Grab input 20 GOSUB 1000 30 IF VALUE=BAR THEN GOTO 100 40 IF VALUE=BAZ THEN GOTO 200 50 IF VALUE=BLA THEN GOTO 300 60 GOTO 20 100 REM Bar stuff 110 blahblah 199 RESUME 200 REM Baz stuff 210 blahblah 299 RESUME 300 REM Bla stuff 310 blahblah 399 RESUME 1000 REM Code that grabs input 1010 blahblah 1100 RESUME Or just here is some actual BASIC game: https://github.com/peteri/ClassicBasic/blob/master/Games/king.bas https://github.com/peteri/ClassicBasic/blob/master/Games/kin... Note that this is a bit more readable than what people worked with since now you have syntax highlighting. I'm not sure where tail calls enter in the picture... there wasn't even support for functions, at best you had GOSUB/RESUME which was essentially assembly-like CALL/RET.

jpindar 7y ago

He was talking about the old BASICs with line numbers, GOTOs, all global variables, and no functions or really any structures.

jkingsbery 7y ago

Certainly, the next few years of my learning to program was unlearning ideas I had developed from coding in Visual Basic. But it gave me the start in understanding how functions work, how sub-procedures work, and how objects work. More importantly though, Visual Basic gavve me the excitement and possibility that I could make this thing on my family's desk do pretty much whatever I wanted. And Visual Basic made that very accessible.