3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
10:43 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <4F030D4A.2010704 at
mail.msu.edu>,?Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> writes:
I would agree with you both. I learned BASIC first because what I
could get my hands on when I was first learning was the trio of
consumer machines: the Commodore PET, the Apple II and the TRS-80. I
wrote BASIC on all three before moving up to 6502 on the PET and 1802
machine code on the Elf (yes, machine code - it was years later that I
first touched an assembler). Like many others on this list, I have
moved up from such humble beginnings to make a decent livelihood in
the field.
I suppose one could over-interpret Dijkstra's statement in its most
literal form and say that those of us who self-learned BASIC first
don't qualify as having been taught it (raising the possibility that
the problem is in the pedagogy not the material).
Here's the whole rant:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
-ethan
I know how to program in BASIC (and many other
imperative programming
languages). ?I also know how to program in Lisp. ?The learning of the
latter did not require me to "un-learn" anything I had previously come
across.
Dijkstra's statement is snarky and amusing. ?It is not, however, an
essential truism.
As someone who learned BASIC first and then a slew of other languages
later, I would also disagree with Dijkstra's statement. ?It's a nice
sound bite that gets people's attention, but it's neither a truism,
nor is it even an essential statement about programming. ?It's just
his bias showing through.