Remember that Dijkstra looked down on anyone who wrote using word processors, because he thought any academic should be able to work out their argument in their head and just write it down. Eventually he came to even reject the mechanical typewriter.
Sapir-Whorf in the sense of language-as-influence however is clearly true, even if academics occasionally state otherwise, because at their core all languages used by communities of a size greater than one individual rely upon semantics that are socially dictated.
Personally, perl screwed me up a lot more than BASIC - but who can argue with the expressive power of regex for text extraction and matching problems?
Wikipedia has a fun excerpt featuring PG (and Ruby) on just this question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Programm...
But I fell very much for Rust in about 2021, and now definitely wouldn't write any more C. Rust has coherent answers to a lot of questions that, to my mind, should be in any C programmer's head.
Now, maybe it helps my CS course's first language was SML/NJ and of course Rust is basically an ML in a trench coat pretending to be a semi-colon language like C. But that CS course was at least half a decade after I began writing C, which was in turn after many years of BASIC (and somewhere in there a little bit of Z80 assembler, but man assembler sucks when the CPU is as limited as the Z80 was, you young people who have a fucking floating point multiply instruction don't know what you've got etc...)
To me, the veteran C programmer, Rust's implementation makes lots of sense, while at the same time it's type system appeals to the more principled Computer Scientist I was taught to be, and its tooling to the Engineer I became as an employee.
Two examples: Wrapping<i32> is exactly how a 32-bit signed integer actually works in any vaguely modern computer. The machine can do this, and so unsurprisingly on a real computer this is nice and fast, despite also being completely safe. But, Wrapping<i32> is a nice elegant type, Wrapping is a polymorphic type, which grants to integers the property of wrapping (modulo) arithmetic for their normal operations, and so i32 is just a type parameter. Beautiful, and yet also fundamentally exactly how the machine works so it's fast.
Second, Option<&T> is exactly the same implementation as a C-style pointer. But it has the same ergonomics as rich Maybe types from a language like ML. So you use it in an inherently safe way, with the compiler catching many common mistakes you could make because they don't make coherent sense in the type system - but at runtime it's exactly the same performance as the nasty C code you'd have written where those mistakes wouldn't be caught.
Rust had include_bytes! from Rust 1.0, include_bytes! is philosophically the same thing, given a filename, it gives you an immutable reference which lives as long as your program, to an array of bytes from the file -- &'static [u8; N]
(Even though the BASIC I learned GW-BASIC, I think Djikstra was complaining about an even earlier BASIC with even less structured control flow.)
Once you go to a "proper" programming language, there is nothing to "unlearn". The new approach is so obviously better! At the same time, having an interpreter up within 2 seconds of turning the computer one was AMAZING and got a lot of people interested in programming.
Much of the software world you see today was built by people who started with BASIC!
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3097...
I miss that... :)
That influx of people with the attitude of "I don't care how computers work, I just want to know enough to solve my problem" shifts the stereotypes around those language users and may erroneously put the fault of it onto the language itself. It certainly feels that way during hiring, where it seems like developers of vastly differing skill or aptitude tend to cluster heavily around certain "friendly" languages.
As for Dijkstra -- arrogance in computer science is measured in nanodijkstras.
Are you saying None is better for beginners?
The fact that the first coding I did was mIRC scripting however should terrify everyone hahaha
well, as long as we aren't working on embedded code for pacemakers
in that case, we'll just skip to the first person in the stack of resumes who didn't start with basic
As someone who got their start with BASIC -- mainly from "BASIC Computer Games" no less -- I was always kind of offended at that quote.