2010/10/2 Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> > > > On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Scott Melton <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Basic. >> > > Basic is definitely not receiving enough credit, in my opinion. Actually, > it's being unjustly vilified. Who was it again who said that anyone who > started programming with Basic was irrecoverably corrupt and would never > become a good programmer? > > I bet that a lot of people on this list started programming with Basic > (myself included), and I think we turned out alright :-) >
Technically, my earliest programming language was Logo, but the earliest one I can remember programming in was BASIC. It was gwbasic (classic line-numbered basic). My early basic programs were highly structured despite the language. I made heavy use of GOSUB and RETURN. Since there was no stack, I used dedicated variables to pass input and output for each routine. This didn't allow recursion, of course, but I didn't know what recursion was at the time. I later learned QuickBasic, which was more structured and not unlike VisualBasic. The first language I really felt at home in was (Object-) Pascal, I liked the way it allowed me to structure both programs and data. In essence, I'd already been structuring my BASIC programs similarly. When I have to sit down and hack something out in VBA, I find I use it as if it were interpreted Pascal with unspeakably ugly syntax. Somewhere along the way I also taught myself HyperTalk (which was ... very different). I went on to Scheme, Oberon(-2), Python, Java, then Clojure. I never could get comfortable with C and C++, though I've hacked a little in both. I've completely repressed any memory of Perl. I never used it much. :o) Conclusions: Learning BASIC is not necessarily harmful. There are more interesting languages out there than I'm ever likely to learn. There's not accounting for taste. YMMV // Ben -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
