
History of the BASIC family of languages - vaksel
http://dotnetmasters.com/HistoryOfBasic.htm
======
mgreenbe
I'm surprised to see that it doesn't mention's Dijkstra's aphorism:

    
    
      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.
    

[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498....](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655-S00/readings/ewd498.html)

~~~
3pt14159
As someone who learned QBASIC at the age of 8 I take offense to this
statement. It took me 10 long years to break out of BASIC thinking, but it
certainly did not mentally mutilate me.

~~~
mgreenbe
Take it up with Dijkstra. I learned QBasic at around the same age, as well,
and I don't feel impaired either---though Scheme certainly changed things at
around age 14. I'm sure he was talking about Other People.

------
tremendo
Well the piece mocks BASIC at every chance, but as has been mentioned, it
really only covers on branch of the BASIC family tree, which maybe I should
have expected from a site titled dot-Net Masters. There were some others that
amounted to decent programming languages IMO (eg. RealBasic, GFA Basic).

------
edw519
Mistitled. BASIC has a huge family tree. This follows one branch.

