🚀 go-pugleaf

rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes:
> In article <1991May9.010805.21605@mcs.kent.edu> rothstei@mcs.kent.edu (Michae
> >"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students who've
> >had a prior exposure to Basic; as potential programmers they are mentally
> >mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." Edsgar Dijkstra
> 
>   Actually, I'm quite happy with BASIC.  It was my first language.

Fear not, for it is possible to recover from BASIC. It was my first language,
too, and I used to think it was quite good for hacking together quick example
programs.

Then came revision time for my Computer Science degree. I decided to try out a
few of the algorithms I had been taught, in the hope that playing with them
would help me to learn them.

I dug out my Structured BASIC interpreter, and I was overjoyed to discover
that I couldn't remember how to write BASIC. I couldn't even put together a
simple three-line function. I struggled for a couple of minutes... then fired
up my Lisp system and used that.

It was a proud moment. I suddenly felt that I could truly call myself a
computer scientist.


mathew