Re: Computing Editorial (please read)

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Michael Black wrote:

>I think having BASIC in small computers was a good thing, and certainly
>Microsoft was behind most commercial implementations.  It was useful
>to have something you could easily run a program under, and it was useful
>for people who weren't all that into the computers, so they could do
>something
>when they took their computer out of the box.
>
>But I don't think BASIC really has anything to do with learning about
>programming.  It is an easy language to get going in, but it never struck
>me as an environment to learn how to program in general.  In other words,
>you could learn how to do things pretty fast, but I'm not sure you really
>learned enough in general to move onto other languages.

<snip>

Surely you know that BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code) was designed precisely to teach people with
no previous experience in programming what programming was
and how to do it.

It was not designed for large projects, nor for pointer manipulation, nor
for object-oriented programming (as we call it today), but it was meant
to introduce certain fundamental concepts essential to programming,
like what a variable is, what an array is, how to execute statements
conditionally, etc.  All without burdening the beginner with a raft of
type declarations, libraries, and the rest.  BASIC serves this purpose
wonderfully.  (Of course, it also introduces the GOTO, which is known
to many computer scientists to cause brain damage.  ;-)

If you have already mastered some other programming language, even
assembler language, then BASIC has little conceptual content to add
to your toolkit.

But if you have never programmed a computer, BASIC is a door to a
brave new world of automated logic and calculation.  What you do on
the other side of that door (including, of course, mastering other
languages) is limited only by your imagination and ambition.

-michael

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