From: INVALID_SEE_SIG@example.com.invalid
In the previous article, Mark Shaw wrote:
> (Bloomberg) -- Thomas E. Kurtz, a Dartmouth College professor
> who co-created the novice-friendly computer code known as Basic
> during the 1960s and helped make it the industry standard for
> programmers during the rise of personal computing, has died.
> He was 96.
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
I love Dijkstra's attitude toward BASIC and COBOL and APL, but I don't
think that is factually accurate. Just to use myself as an example, I
learned BASIC on the very Dartmouth OS Kurtz worked in, and I went on
to teach myself PL/I and to be the top undergrad student in math (with
a computer "concentration") at my (selective) school, and then to earn
a scholarship to a fairly prestigious graduate program in the field,
where I finished with very respectable grades. I furthermore went on
to teach the subject at the university level for a few years, and did
pretty well at that. I know other counter-examples.
But Dijsktra is certainly correct insofar as the whole field would
have been better off if BASIC had simply never been created. If you
can learn BASIC, you can learn Pascal or PL/I and be way better off
right from the start.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
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