4 ms·

Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude. I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we

by smarks 2y ago

Like several others here, my first programming language was BASIC. For this we owe Kurtz a debt of gratitude. I know Dijkstra is famous for having said that we're mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration, but you know, I kinda think we didn't turn out half bad.

microtherion 2y ago
I know literally zero working programmers who learned programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught — not even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out. Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.
- niteshpant 2y ago
  Consider me naive, but what way did Dijkstra thought it should be taught? Someone who first learned to code in QBASIC
  - themadturk 2y ago
    He probably thought programming students should be taught Pascal, the academic language he pioneered. It is quite different from BASIC.
    - Jtsummers 2y ago
      Pascal was Wirth, not Dijkstra.
      - themadturk 2y ago
        Sorry, misremembering my meager computing history...
  - Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
    “On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science”[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Teaching_Computer_Science https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Tea...
  - microtherion 2y ago
    Dijkstra thought of computer science as a subdomain of mathematics, and thought that hands-on experimentation with actual computers would mostly lead students astray. A program should all be worked out and proven correct before (optionally) feeding it to a computer, and testing and even more so debugging were abhorrent practices. BASIC, on the other hand, is more aligned with what Seymour Papert later came to call "Constructionism": the student learns by experimentation.
    - tasty_freeze 2y ago
      It is the "correct by construction" approach vs the "construct by correction" approach.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
      That's how it was with CS at Purdue when I was there in beginning of the 1990's. It was Computational Science, not Computer Science, and was in the math department. We did everything wiht pen and paper until I got into my 300 level classes and we got access to the NeXT cubes and IBM 3090. I ended up switching to networking and the tech track, but it was definitely different...
      - microtherion 2y ago
        Ironically, I grew up with limited access to computers, so I wrote many programs on paper first, including a FORTH implementation in assembly language I wrote over summer break with a typewriter, waiting for school to start again so I could actually test it hands on.
    - systemBuilder 2y ago
      Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms. Computer Science is all other algorithms!
  - schoen 2y ago
    Other commenters are completely right to mention his concern for proofs and the "Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science", but the most BASIC-specific thing that he was associated with was criticism of the GOTO statement. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... In original BASIC, the GOTO is a foundational mechanism and a majority of programs would have used it, sometimes extensively. Dijkstra thought for many reasons that this wasn't good style and didn't promote clear thinking. And yes, one consequence of that is that it would be harder to prove programs correct or just to reason about whether they were correct. Programs that overuse GOTOs (or from the point of view of later structured programming and functional programming advocates, perhaps programs that use GOTOs at all) were stigmatized as "spaghetti code". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code By the way, this concern is not just about aesthetics: some of the ideas that Dijkstra was advocating are arguably those that newer programming languages like Haskell and Rust can use to find bugs in code automatically at compile-time, or to make it harder to write certain bugs at all. The line between Dijkstra's advocacy and these techniques is complicated but I think there is a connection. So partly we might say that Dijkstra was not just concerned with how to make it easier for humans to think clearly about program correctness, but ultimately also about how to make it easier for computers to help humans automatically determine (parts of) program correctness. And it's true that the GOTO style complicates that task.
    - tinco 2y ago
      Kind of ironic that nowadays many people in our generation consider the newer generations to be lacking fundamental education because they never used GOTO based programming languages. I've talked to multiple people who lamented that young programmers have never done assembly or BASIC.
      - numbsafari 2y ago
        It’s helpful to have a mental model of how the computer works. I don’t know if it’s necessary that one have spent mountains of time building real software using a GOTO/jmp style, but having exposure to it would be nice, rather than hiding it away. Jeff Dunteman’s assembly programming books included a “chapter 0” that I always loved, and which really stuck with me for how creatively they taught those topics.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Haskell.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Hask... - describing why, in 2001, he thought Haskell was a good choice for a first college course in CS. You can read many of his thoughts here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  To be fair to Dijkstra, he was writing about how he believed university students should be taught. Two years before that cruelty paper was published, I was getting my first exposure ever to computer programming when my parents bought a Commodore 64 that came with a BASIC manual that showed how to make a Pong clone. I was 6 years old. There's maybe an analogy to riding a bike. If you're aspiring to compete in a grand tour, you probably want power meters, lactate threshold and VO2 max tests in a lab, training that is principled and somewhat scientific in the way it builds toward a goal. If you're 6, your parents just put you on the seat and push you until your balance gets good enough that you can take the training wheels off.
  - lars_francke 2y ago
    Total aside: Training wheels are a thing I remember from my youth but today (at least here) they are barely used at all anymore. I'm still used to the phrase (taking the training wheels off) but I'm fairly certain my kids will grow up not using it.
    - rswail 2y ago
      The sort of pushbikes for littler kids lets them learn balance and steering before also having to learn how to pedal and brake. So half the learning happens on those pushbikes before they move to real bikes.
  - microtherion 2y ago
    Yes, Dijkstra was writing about the education of university students. I don't know whether he ever wrote anything about elementary school (or earlier) computer education, but I doubt he'd have approved of it, let alone of a hands on approach.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > If you're 6, your parents just put you on the seat and push you until your balance gets good enough that you can take the training wheels off. Which can take a very long time, because you have training wheels to begin with. If you're about to teach a kid how to ride a bicycle, it's far better to do without them. And the pedals too; learning how to use those is a huge distraction from learning to find and hold your balance. There are special “kick bikes” for tiny tots to propel by kicking off the ground. And some of those can later be converted into “normal” bikes by attaching a chain drive, but... Feels kludgy, and is usually rather expensive. If you can find an ordinary bike where you can get the saddle low enough for your kid to reach the ground with their feet, just remove the pedals and let them use that as a “kick bike”. If you can find a (gentle!) slope to practice on, you'll be able to replace the pedals in a matter of a few weeks at most, or probably days.
crest 2y ago
Enough LISP and Assembler can eventually cure the worst BASIC inflicted brain damage, but some scars remain.
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
  Messing with hardware and Forth... fun times
lgeorget 2y ago
My first ever programming language was VBA for Excel because I found a magazine with a tutorial on that laying around in my father's office, no idea why. I think the second one was the Basic on my Texas Instruments calculator.

by smarks 2y ago

microtherion 2y ago

I know literally zero working programmers who learned programming the way Dijkstra thought it should be taught — not even Dijkstra himself, as Donald Knuth once gently pointed out. Practically everybody in my generation started off with BASIC. On the other hand, at some point (when?), this practice stopped, and the newer generations turned out fine starting out with more civilized languages.

niteshpant 2y ago
Consider me naive, but what way did Dijkstra thought it should be taught? Someone who first learned to code in QBASIC
- themadturk 2y ago
  He probably thought programming students should be taught Pascal, the academic language he pioneered. It is quite different from BASIC.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Pascal was Wirth, not Dijkstra.
    - themadturk 2y ago
      Sorry, misremembering my meager computing history...
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
  “On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science”[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Teaching_Computer_Science https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cruelty_of_Really_Tea...
- microtherion 2y ago
  Dijkstra thought of computer science as a subdomain of mathematics, and thought that hands-on experimentation with actual computers would mostly lead students astray. A program should all be worked out and proven correct before (optionally) feeding it to a computer, and testing and even more so debugging were abhorrent practices. BASIC, on the other hand, is more aligned with what Seymour Papert later came to call "Constructionism": the student learns by experimentation.
  - tasty_freeze 2y ago
    It is the "correct by construction" approach vs the "construct by correction" approach.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
    That's how it was with CS at Purdue when I was there in beginning of the 1990's. It was Computational Science, not Computer Science, and was in the math department. We did everything wiht pen and paper until I got into my 300 level classes and we got access to the NeXT cubes and IBM 3090. I ended up switching to networking and the tech track, but it was definitely different...
    - microtherion 2y ago
      Ironically, I grew up with limited access to computers, so I wrote many programs on paper first, including a FORTH implementation in assembly language I wrote over summer break with a typewriter, waiting for school to start again so I could actually test it hands on.
  - systemBuilder 2y ago
    Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms. Computer Science is all other algorithms!
- schoen 2y ago
  Other commenters are completely right to mention his concern for proofs and the "Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science", but the most BASIC-specific thing that he was associated with was criticism of the GOTO statement. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p... In original BASIC, the GOTO is a foundational mechanism and a majority of programs would have used it, sometimes extensively. Dijkstra thought for many reasons that this wasn't good style and didn't promote clear thinking. And yes, one consequence of that is that it would be harder to prove programs correct or just to reason about whether they were correct. Programs that overuse GOTOs (or from the point of view of later structured programming and functional programming advocates, perhaps programs that use GOTOs at all) were stigmatized as "spaghetti code". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code By the way, this concern is not just about aesthetics: some of the ideas that Dijkstra was advocating are arguably those that newer programming languages like Haskell and Rust can use to find bugs in code automatically at compile-time, or to make it harder to write certain bugs at all. The line between Dijkstra's advocacy and these techniques is complicated but I think there is a connection. So partly we might say that Dijkstra was not just concerned with how to make it easier for humans to think clearly about program correctness, but ultimately also about how to make it easier for computers to help humans automatically determine (parts of) program correctness. And it's true that the GOTO style complicates that task.
  - tinco 2y ago
    Kind of ironic that nowadays many people in our generation consider the newer generations to be lacking fundamental education because they never used GOTO based programming languages. I've talked to multiple people who lamented that young programmers have never done assembly or BASIC.
    - numbsafari 2y ago
      It’s helpful to have a mental model of how the computer works. I don’t know if it’s necessary that one have spent mountains of time building real software using a GOTO/jmp style, but having exposure to it would be nice, rather than hiding it away. Jeff Dunteman’s assembly programming books included a “chapter 0” that I always loved, and which really stuck with me for how creatively they taught those topics.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Haskell.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Hask... - describing why, in 2001, he thought Haskell was a good choice for a first college course in CS. You can read many of his thoughts here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html
nonameiguess 2y ago
To be fair to Dijkstra, he was writing about how he believed university students should be taught. Two years before that cruelty paper was published, I was getting my first exposure ever to computer programming when my parents bought a Commodore 64 that came with a BASIC manual that showed how to make a Pong clone. I was 6 years old. There's maybe an analogy to riding a bike. If you're aspiring to compete in a grand tour, you probably want power meters, lactate threshold and VO2 max tests in a lab, training that is principled and somewhat scientific in the way it builds toward a goal. If you're 6, your parents just put you on the seat and push you until your balance gets good enough that you can take the training wheels off.
- lars_francke 2y ago
  Total aside: Training wheels are a thing I remember from my youth but today (at least here) they are barely used at all anymore. I'm still used to the phrase (taking the training wheels off) but I'm fairly certain my kids will grow up not using it.
  - rswail 2y ago
    The sort of pushbikes for littler kids lets them learn balance and steering before also having to learn how to pedal and brake. So half the learning happens on those pushbikes before they move to real bikes.
- microtherion 2y ago
  Yes, Dijkstra was writing about the education of university students. I don't know whether he ever wrote anything about elementary school (or earlier) computer education, but I doubt he'd have approved of it, let alone of a hands on approach.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > If you're 6, your parents just put you on the seat and push you until your balance gets good enough that you can take the training wheels off. Which can take a very long time, because you have training wheels to begin with. If you're about to teach a kid how to ride a bicycle, it's far better to do without them. And the pedals too; learning how to use those is a huge distraction from learning to find and hold your balance. There are special “kick bikes” for tiny tots to propel by kicking off the ground. And some of those can later be converted into “normal” bikes by attaching a chain drive, but... Feels kludgy, and is usually rather expensive. If you can find an ordinary bike where you can get the saddle low enough for your kid to reach the ground with their feet, just remove the pedals and let them use that as a “kick bike”. If you can find a (gentle!) slope to practice on, you'll be able to replace the pedals in a matter of a few weeks at most, or probably days.

crest 2y ago

Enough LISP and Assembler can eventually cure the worst BASIC inflicted brain damage, but some scars remain.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Messing with hardware and Forth... fun times

lgeorget 2y ago

My first ever programming language was VBA for Excel because I found a magazine with a tutorial on that laying around in my father's office, no idea why. I think the second one was the Basic on my Texas Instruments calculator.