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History of the BASIC family of languages
- mgreenbe 17y agoI'm surprised to see that it doesn't mention's Dijkstra's aphorism: 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. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498....
- 3pt14159 17y agoAs someone who learned QBASIC at the age of 8 I take offense to this statement. It took me 10 long years to break out of BASIC thinking, but it certainly did not mentally mutilate me.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mgreenbe 17y agoTake it up with Dijkstra. I learned QBasic at around the same age, as well, and I don't feel impaired either---though Scheme certainly changed things at around age 14. I'm sure he was talking about Other People.
- edw519 17y agoMistitled. BASIC has a huge family tree. This follows one branch.
- tremendo 17y agoWell the piece mocks BASIC at every chance, but as has been mentioned, it really only covers on branch of the BASIC family tree, which maybe I should have expected from a site titled dot-Net Masters. There were some others that amounted to decent programming languages IMO (eg. RealBasic, GFA Basic).