Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickolai | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Though i'd like to have someone name me a language, adding which to one's skillset would make one a worse programmer.

View on HN

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.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

-- Dijkstra

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW...

I guess I would recommend perhaps LISP, FORTRAN and APL if you wanted to pick old time languages. More recently you might want to take a look at Ruby and Haskell, to pick a functional language, and COBOL, which has some interesting ideas in it you won't find in some of the other languages.

-- Guy Steele

Notice that he lists COBOL as a language to learn. I've always found Dijkstra to be a little over the top (often the only way to get people to listen), and Steele more pragmatic.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/Programming-Languages-Guy-St...

Dijkstra was provably completely wrong about this: pretty much all the most talented programmers I have ever talked to or read about started with BASIC.

The starting language matters very little, the important part is to remain curious and to keep learning.

You can waist time; which you could use for other things, making you a worse programmer than if you would have been if you picked Prolog instead :P

Seriously, our attention span, time on this earth and even ability to learn is limited ;)

Intercal?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com