From: le@main.lekno.ws
Mark Shaw wrote:
> 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.
>
Having basically only worked in BASIC despite a collegiate exposure
to Fortran 77,what do you see as the advantages of these other languages?
-=-=-
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--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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