Read other letters about this article

• Wednesday, September 13, 2006 08:48 PM

  Yes, BASIC sucks...

  ...but Brin still makes some very good points. I'm working on my doctorate in CS now, and the students I see really are missing some of the basic nuts & bolts. And coincidentally, those fundamentals are precisely the ones on which BASIC focuses.

  Seriously though, BASIC is such a simple language and I know that Brin is smart enough to write his own version. Most open source projects start from some random person being annoyed because he/she can't find something online that meets his/her exact needs...

  And just to reply to the other letters: Python's cool, but it covers up a lot of the fundamentals. Perl has the same problem, plus has the added misfortune of being amazingly difficult to read. HTML isn't even a procedural language (and it doesn't come "pre-installed" on computers--it's just interpreted by a browser). JavaScript can be dreadfully unpredictable and testy in its behavior, and it's a bitch to debug. (I know--I coded in it professionally for a year.) And please, let's not educate tomorrow's coders in MS's current kludgey offerings--at least until they clean up their act and make their stuff compatible with everyone else's. When you use one of their products, you have this nasty tendency to end up with all the others too. And finally, it's and its are different words. Maybe it's snobbish of me, but I have a hard time reading letters that confuse them.

  Good luck David and Ben. :)

  —Adam Smith Read Adam Smith's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel