5 Apr
2020
5 Apr
'20
5:40 p.m.
> well, close.
> His BASIC quote is:
> "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."
> Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That Might
> Hurt":
> https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, geneb wrote:
That doesn't explain the millions of kids that got
their start in BASIC and
grew up to learn skills that could wipe the floor with him...
I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to computer programming
should be BASIC. VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification,
without having had to already learn underlying structures, variable
types, how to run a compiler, etc. After creating first program, and a
few more, in a very short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate
what kind of programming is most interesting, and switch to the most
appropriate language. Having already created a few token programs, it is
then less onerous to learn compilers, data types, system overhead,
"ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.
Q: If Bill Gates hadn't written a BASIC interpreter, where would we be
now?