Then you say "There are better options than BASIC for teaching new programmers." That's not what was written.

I've read countless anecdotes from perfectly capable programmers who not only learned, but first discovered their interest in the field, via BASIC. No language "mentally mutilates programmers beyond hope of regeneration". And BASIC probably isn't even the worst one for learning purposes.

He calls out BASIC specifically because it was ubiquitous and often the only option on the machines novices would have available at the time. It logically follows that most programmers of that era, capable or otherwise, started on BASIC. Since he’s not here to tell us, I can only assume Dijkstra met the occasional exceptional individual who began learning to program in a more mathematically rigorous language during that time and was left with a vastly more favorable impression.

Remember, Dijkstra was a professor and he was an expert on teaching programming. He would have far more experience with the effect he claims than I do. I hazard to guess that is true with respect to you too.

And yes he’s obviously engaging in rhetorical hyperbole in the text you quote.

> "He calls out BASIC specifically because it was ubiquitous and often the only option on the machines novices would have available at the time."

EWD's quote is from 1975 which is just barely the start of the microcomputer era (the Altair 8800 came out in '75 and the Apple II in '77), so he's not referring to those. Most people writing programs would have had access to mainframes and therefore had access to multiple language interpreters and compilers I would think.

The Altair 8800 came out in January 1975; Gates and Allen's Altair BASIC, the first microcomputer BASIC, came out "shortly thereafter" and EWD498 was written in June 1975. That's hardly long enough for an explosion. Again, Dijkstra probably had never even heard of either when he penned his missive and it's clear that his opinion of BASIC was well formed even before 1975.

People had to create specialized languages for learning purpose to compete with builtin graphics feature of basic.