I'm sorry but it's bullshit. I taught myself programming with BASIC when I was a kid, my first programs were horrible, unstructured things with GOTOs everywhere and redundant code and yet I was able to teach myself Scheme as well a few years later.

In fact, I find that I understand the point behind useful programming language constructs (and, yes, their beauty) after spending some time suffering due to the lack of them.

You have a lot to prove. A giant as big as Dijkstra was, he publicly said that "corentin has mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration" and you're out to prove him wrong.

Good luck. :-) Makes me feel more lucky for starting with x86 assembly although I am not sure it's any better than BASIC. God bless us!

I don't think Dijkstra's absolutisms have aged particularly well. On some things he turned out completely right, on other things staggeringly wrong. In this article, look at his endorsement of the idea that coding should be left to the final 25% of a project's schedule. It's all very hit and miss, yet he delivers every claim in the same godlike tone of infallibility. The idea that maybe everything hasn't been figured out about software development - that in fact, maybe not very much has been - seems alien to him.

Dijkstra could not predict that in 2007 to-do lists and message boards like Facebook will become multi-billion dollar businesses. Sorry to poop on your beliefs, but "agile" BS can be applied only on CRUD projects that have nothing in common with Computer Science.

Giants routinely get things wrong. It's called an argument from authority. The consequences of accepting arguments from authority because of their authority can be damaging and wasteful--read about Linus Pauling and Vitamin C, for example. So I would say he has no more to prove than otherwise.

It was just a conjecture of his that history didn't bear out. Thinking in basic is bad. Great leaps in programming and the availablity of knowlege about programming (other people's good code) made it easy to stop thinking in basic if one was motivated.

Great men once thought that the earth was flat and there were only 4 elements. It is trivial today for even a nitwit to prove otherwise. This does not mean that these great men are now less great or that nitwits are now smarter.

Miranda was my first language. Did me a fat lot of good ;)

>> someone introduced to computers via Basic is in all probability mentally mutilated beyond redemption.

Elitism and snobbery at it's finest--like saying someone whose first bike had training wheels can never learn a ten speed.

BASIC is a gateway programming drug because in many incarnations, it can DO things with a short learning curve, which is rewarding. Many intro comp sci classes start with Waxing Off as opposed to creating something and building interest which then drives the lessons. There's no deeper understanding of WHY an approach is wrong than when you've been bitten by it's ugly consequences.

Of course it's bullshit. A generation of hackers started with Basic on TRS-80s and Apple IIs and Commodore 64s. Several generations, actually.

Given this comment of Dijkstra's and his (hilarious) swipe at PL/I in the article, here's a rather satisfying counterexample:

Up till then I had programmed mostly in Basic and PL/1.

http://wiki.alu.org/Paul_Graham's_Road_to_Lisp