2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
|
|
|
BASIC
|
|
|
|
|
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
|
|
|
/bay'sic/ , n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
|
|
|
|
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was
|
|
|
|
the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra
|
|
|
|
observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that It
|
|
|
|
is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that
|
|
|
|
have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
|
|
|
|
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. This is another case (like Pascal )
|
|
|
|
of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed
|
|
|
|
as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short
|
|
|
|
BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything
|
|
|
|
longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
|
|
|
|
harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if
|
|
|
|
historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the
|
|
|
|
1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
|
2018-10-15 09:25:24 -04:00
|
|
|
BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Earlier
|
|
|
|
versions of this entry claiming this was a later backronym were incorrect.
|