State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Toby Thain]

On 2020-04-05 8:40 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
>>> 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?
> 
> 

Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.