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Teaching Programming with Basic
I started programming in GW-BASIC on an IBM PC clone running MS-DOS. Back then, many so-called home and business computers came bundled with a BASIC interpreter, mostly made by or licensed from Microsoft. They all looked similar. You were greeted by a screen with a READY or OK prompt and a blinking cursor waiting for your input. The “screen editor” and interpreter were all in one in the true sense of the word – they weren’t bolted together like the separate text editors and interpreters/compilers we use these days…
There are no functions, no object oriented programming, no libraries, no frameworks – just a few simple instructions and jumps that can be directly mapped to machine code. “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.” – Edsger Dijkstra If one wants to understand how computers work, I think it’s easier to start closer to the level they operate, and introduce useful abstractions like functional and object oriented programming as time goes on.
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