

Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language - MikeTaylor
http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/where-dijkstra-went-wrong-the-value-of-basic-as-a-first-programming-language/

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pmccool
Thing is, the sort of thing that BASIC makes you good at is exactly the sort
of thing that Dijkstra was railing against.

The point, as I understand it wasn't that learning BASIC made you incapable of
writing code, but that it taught habits that were fatal to the kind of
mathematically rigourous thinking that he was trying to encourage.

