2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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BASIC
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/bay'sic/ , n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
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experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was
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the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra
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observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that It
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is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that
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have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally
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mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. This is another case (like Pascal )
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of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed
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as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short
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BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything
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longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
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harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if
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historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the
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1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
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[1995: Some languages called BASIC aren't quite this nasty any more, having
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acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their
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line numbers. ESR] BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
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Instruction Code. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later
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backronym were incorrect.
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