Long-term lack of exposure to significant programming paradigms has got to impact your skills, how could it be otherwise?
I've witnessed the pain of others in transitioning from procedural to object-oriented methodologies, it isn't pretty! I've also seen OO abused when treated as the only paradigm in town. It's the old story, "when all you have is a hammer..." I highly recommend the fantastic "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" article for more on the subject: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html Closer to home, it's impossible that anyone would create the universally hated Java Date/Time if they had first been exposed to functional programming and the correct use of immutable objects (ideas that JodaTime clearly embraced) So yes, BASIC can harm your skills, at least if you become institutionalised within the language. But it's not really BASIC that's at fault here, it's the concept if being locked into a particular (restricted) way of doing things, and then struggling to break free of the self-imposed prison that such an approach can create. On 3 October 2010 00:24, Liam Knox <[email protected]> wrote: > I think its pretty irrelevant if you started on BASIC or any other language > for that matter and how that has impacted your current skills. Someone who > feels they have been technically crippled permanently from exposure to BASIC > would likely be not very be technical anyway. > > > On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 12:33 AM, Russel Winder <[email protected]>wrote: > >> On Sat, 2010-10-02 at 07:36 -0700, Cédric Beust ♔ wrote: >> [ . . . ] >> > 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? >> >> Dijkstra, who is both the source of some great things that have >> benefited programming and software development, and things that have >> acted as barriers holding back software development for decades. >> >> "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." >> >> "I think of the company advertising 'Thought Processors' or the >> college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least >> helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a >> criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery." >> >> > I bet that a lot of people on this list started programming with Basic >> > (myself included), and I think we turned out alright :-) >> >> Hummm... people who started with Basic and yet have become good >> programmers in a number of languages must have great powers of recovery >> and regeneration. This must mean they are either vampires or trolls ;-) >> >> -- >> Russel. >> >> ============================================================================= >> Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: >> sip:[email protected] <sip%[email protected]> >> 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] >> London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder >> > > -- > 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]<javaposse%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. > -- Kevin Wright mail / gtalk / msn : [email protected] pulse / skype: kev.lee.wright twitter: @thecoda -- 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.
