History of the BASIC family of languages | Hacker News Reader

History of the BASIC family of languages

dotnetmasters.com

9 pointsvaksel5 comments

I'm surprised to see that it doesn't mention's Dijkstra's aphorism:

  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.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498....

As someone who learned QBASIC at the age of 8 I take offense to this statement. It took me 10 long years to break out of BASIC thinking, but it certainly did not mentally mutilate me.

Take it up with Dijkstra. I learned QBasic at around the same age, as well, and I don't feel impaired either---though Scheme certainly changed things at around age 14. I'm sure he was talking about Other People.

Well the piece mocks BASIC at every chance, but as has been mentioned, it really only covers on branch of the BASIC family tree, which maybe I should have expected from a site titled dot-Net Masters. There were some others that amounted to decent programming languages IMO (eg. RealBasic, GFA Basic).

Mistitled. BASIC has a huge family tree. This follows one branch.

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