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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 10:19 AM

  Why BASIC?

  There ARE better programming languages around that could replace BASIC for beginners.

  As many others I was doing my first steps in programming learning BASIC. 15 years ago it was ok, because BASIC is a simple language, and there was nothing else that could run on Z80 hardware as easy as BASIC was. But I must tell - it took me _years_ later to unlearn all the bad habbits that you'll quickly acquire struggling all the BASIC's limitations (infamuos goto's, copy-paste antipattern, tigh coupling, NIH syndrome - you name it).

  Now, 15 years after, being professional with experience in many commodity languages (c, perl, php, java, ruby) I can't even think of recommending such ugly and damn language as BASIC is to anyone as introduction to the wounderful world of computer programming.

  Don't get me wrong. I'm not kind of snob, who thinks that there is only one RIGH language and everything else is crap (actually, to some degree I'm - after I learned about ruby :) There are many factors that define what language to use for partucular job, and in the end it's programmer to be blamed for ugly code, not the language. It's obvious that for education you need a different kind of language that would allow to teach essential concepts and at the same time will not bloat the environment with "decoration" which purpose is very specific (like java's classpath for example).

  For this, I think, any popular scripting language is good. My personal choice these days would be Ruby, before it was Perl. But Phyton is great too. Heck, even PHP is better! Not only these languages allows smooth paradigm shift from procedure-oriented design to OO design, they also support and sometime encourage the use of good programming techniques and design patterns - the only skills required to make you a good programmer (others required to make you the best :)

  BASIC is a history, let's leave it in peace.

  —Igor
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