From: mshaw@panix.com
J.D. Baldwin wrote:
> 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.
M3 ToO. My first language was COBOL (early 1970s) then on to BASIC,
Module-2, Pascal, C, C++, then a few scripting languages such as
Perl, Tcl, and Python that I'm not really counting. BASIC really
didn't hold me back, particularly after I got into an undergrad
data structures class. I mean, I was momentarily very puzzled by
the absence of line numbers, but got over that pretty quickly.
Fun times, fun times.
> 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.
Agreed.
--
Mark Shaw moc TOD liamg TA wahsnm
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"Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
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