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A good programmer has experienced many languages and done things in many ways. A good programmer has compared all these various experiences and understands the advantages and disadvantages of each language and programming technique. A good programmer doesn't get bogged down in line numbers and GOTO statements and never move beyond that. If someone does get bogged down they never had the attitude to be a good programmer.

I was on Basic from 1986 to 1993, and it was the most meaningful years of my life.

Depends on the BASIC. I use RealBasic at work as an alternative to LabView. It's object oriented, multithreaded and completely "Visual".

Am I the only person on the Earth who just writes off hysterical, panty-wetting stuff like this? When did he say this? in the 1960s or something? It's 2010 now, right?

There's something to it. I recently downloaded a ZX Spectrum+ manual from worldofspectrum.org (the colorful one), and was amazed by how simple the language is. The complete reference takes like 10 pages? And it can draw lines and circles..

Now compare it with any modern language, such as Java or Python. The language description itself takes 10x more than that, and the libraries available are vast. I am not arguing it's a bad thing; I am just arguing that simplicity may be a key here.

...and I'm wondering: what's with the random sushi pictures?

I disagree with the premise that BASIC teaches bad habits. I stick with the old adage a bad workman blames his tools. BASIC teaches kids (like I was over 30 years ago) from the ages of 5-6 how to put together simple logic, and gives them the very basics of languages constructs like variables, loops, sub routines, etc. without them having to grasp structures, classes, polymorphism, OO, etc. that a lot of grown ups that have been involved with writing code for quite some time can have issues with.

As a programmer who started with old-school BASIC (numbered lines, etc), I was overjoyed with better elements of structured programming in Turbo Basic, and totally excited with C when I learned it. It felt like having my hands untied. So I would state the contrary: you cannot fully appreciate the structured programming unless you went through the GOTO hell.

I hear a lot of similar FUD from some people, like "you can't grok OOP if you started with C", or "anyone who touched .NET or Java is lost for C++..." It boils down to "people are idiots, they can't possibly learn anything new, they are either indoctrinated at birth in My True Way, or lost and hopeless." Who in their right mind would take that seriously?

I've gone from MSX Basic to Turbo Basic to Turbo C. Now I can code in all kinds of languages, assembly, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, etc..

I do think that BASIC has value as a first language because it gives back results immediately. Sure, nowadays there are other script languages, so you don't have to go through compiling and all the other complexity. BASIC is valuable because it's just that: basic. You don't have to worry as a first-timer about libraries, include files, functions and everything else. You get down to the very basics like variables and program flow.

And after a lot of years of BASIC programming I knew the limitations of the language (which largely depends on the interpreter). That's when I switched over to Turbo C. And to be honest it didn't took me long at all to learn C because I was a pretty reasonable BASIC programmer.

What I _do_ object against is stuff like Visual Basic. That's taking a limited language which is simple and jamming it into a place where it shouldn't belong. To let Visual Basic work, they stuffed all kinds of non-original basic stuff in there which make it more complex then something like Visual C. Their idea was "lets make making real application easy with Basic, because Basic is easy right?". It doesn't work like that.

I also think that Java is not a language that people should start programming in to be honest. Object oriented programming is NOT something people should learn before they had a taste of procedural programming. Fun fact. I went back to my old school to see about taking some night classes to get my CS degree. (I dropped out at the time and I've learned a LOT more on the job then what they were teaching.) At their open house classes I asked about procedural programming and if they still taught it. They scoffed and said nobody uses that anymore. This when I've been a Linux kernel developer for 10+ years now which is 100% procedural ANSI C. It's all Java they teach nowadays.

In closing. I think a good programmer is somebody who explores. If I have a Windows application that does something cool, I take it through a disassembler to see what makes it tick. I look up DOT NET C# code snippets to see what it's all about. I look through COBOL and ALGOL source code to see what constructs people used in the past. I patch ARM assembly code to fix bugs. I do all those things and not rigidly stick to a single programming environment. A good programmer is a state of mind, not the language he works in.

Years before I took any formal course, I was looking at the manual of a BASIC computer and making circles on the screen by programming a dot that kept to the same distance to another and rotated. I still remember the emotion of seeing a real circle emerge on screen. I don't know if BASIC helped me much to program, but the immediacy of the thing certainly did much to keep my interest alive.

Computer-science legend Edsger W. Dijkstra famously wrote: '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'

Like all eminently quotable people, Dijkstra tended to hyperbole and oversimplification.

...but it was BASIC. And the expectations were so low. "10 PRINT "Hello, World!", "20 GOTO 10" and it started doing something. The programming manual was well worn by the time I was 10, would that have happened with any other language? I doubt it. Things like lack of scoping makes the easy things easier and the hard things harder. The point isn't to learn everything from your first language, the point is to get started and interested at all. Moving to DOS was sorta ok, but moving to Windows killed my interest. C/C++ was just horribly complicated, I remember trying to get up a window in the Win32 API and it was like wtf, how hard can this be? MFC was even worse, Java (really early java, on hardware of the time) was slow and unresponsive as fuck, Javascript was a toy language for websites and never really like Pascal or VB much either. I didn't regain my interest in programming until I went with C++/Qt, or maybe more Qt than C++ really. QMainWindow *mw = new QMainWindow(), mw->show(). The hard stuff is still hard, but I very very rarely find I write "overhead" code that I shouldn't have to.

easy language first your get-over is

FORTH started I at-all me affected not and

Dijkstra, who taught at Eindhoven Technical University - which is how I superficially came to know him - was mostly a self-declared legend. He cultivated his own myth, even going as far as publishing a little book with his own quotes.

I think the author is mostly on. He's aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct... if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.

And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I'm learning to enjoy functional programming.

I will say... there was a time when I was probably close to being "ruined." It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn't seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn't seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.

But there was one thing: I'd had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought "Man, this is weird," more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought "this is weird, but interesting." The third year, I thought "Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here."

And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I'm pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.

Because I now think there's either a critical period [wikipedia.org] (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they'll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they'll be interested in what they don't already know, rather than arriving at the point where "they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need." [blogspot.com]

And if they don't get so exposed, they become Blub programmers [paulgraham.com], where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don't easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.

To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn't end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn't possibly be the last programming language you'd ever need (if it weren't enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80's. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn't the only one doing that either.

I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven't touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.