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Comment by thimp | Hacker News Reader

No they haven't but they have destroyed usability, my laptop battery and left a lot of brain damaged people who are incapable of seeing when a simple solution for a problem will do.

Case in point, a number of years ago I built a static web page for delivering software distribution for an SME. This is hosted in S3 on cloudfront. It is one HTML page, one image and one CSS file. There is a bit of plain DOM javascript which pulls the software versions out of metadata files on the CDN and updates a SPAN in the page. Someone came along and couldn't work it out so rewrote the whole fucking thing with AngularJS. It looks the same. There was no benefit to doing this. It was just that's how we do things. The first page hit is 220k. I don't even know how they managed to do that.

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> a lot a lot of brain damaged people

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.

I've heard this a lot over the years but I disagree entirely. It's a matter of self motivation. I started on BASIC in 1981. They taught us Pascal at university. I moved to C on Unix and eventually into embedded C. Then back out to C++ and then more recently Go.

What I tend to see from the FE developers I've worked with is someone told them this was a gold mine and they did a code camp to get where they did. There is no care, consideration or self motivation past getting paid thus the understanding is limited only to the direct thing that needs to be done via whatever means it can be done quickly.

If it's a means to an end, then you do not learn. You have to enjoy and care for what you do and cultivate it.

I've heard this a lot over the years but I disagree entirely.

It's a quote from a semi-humorous essay by Dijkstra from 1975. The essay is basically Dijkstra making fun of all the popular programming languages and technologies of the time and pointing out how they all suck.

Disagree.

I started with Commodore 64 basic, then progressed to PASCAL, 'C', C++, this and that ... finally landing on the "Python" tile on that particular board game.

I won't say I'm a virtuoso, or aLawful Good Paladin Programmer weilding patterns or clean code, or whatever, but by and large BASIC's influence on my tinkering is down to the ways I don't do things.

It's a harmful perception.

As the great Yoda says, "you must unlearn what you have learned", but that doesn't mean that you are "mentally mutilated" by something. It's only if you stop learning and growing, that's where there real harm is.

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