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Comment by zubairq | Hacker News Reader

I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64 in my case. Oh, how times have changed for the better now :)

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“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.“

I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC. If you created something in basic, or even suggested using it, someone would post that quote in the usenet thread. Like Godwin’s Law.

It’s a shame, because it was so accessible, not just because it was right there but also because it does make it very easy for beginners to understand programming in a way that structured programming doesn’t.

If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript.

For me the biggest motivation to not dip my toes too much into BASIC on 8-bit computers was the abysmal performance. If I remember right, assembler was about 100x faster, compiled high-level languages like PASCAL about 10x faster, and FORTH somewhere inbetween compiled languages and assembler.

FORTH could've been a very elegant alternative to BASIC on 8-bit class hardware, but one major problem with it was that having to enter absolutely everything as RPN/postfix notation could be very unintuitive at times. E.g. prefix or mixfix notation for some things such as math is only very slightly harder to parse, but then provides a big gain in user friendliness. And floating point math takes up a big chunk of the code in typical BASIC ROMs, so it was clearly regarded as important to duplicate that desk calculator-like UX.

Perhaps forth for newbies wouldn't be too friendly... but you can totally write an infix parser in forth, and toggle in and out of that parser.

Look up the Jupiter Ace from 1982. A lot like a Timex-Sinclair, but with Forth as the built in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

At least on the C64, I use BASIC as largely a scripting language and master scheduler, calling 6502 machine language subroutines with SYS, and reserving BASIC for the very highest level main loop or non-speed-sensitive tasks that would be inconvenient, bulky or unnecessary to write in assembly. It gives me a scaffold to hang things off.

So, basically how people use python now?

Learning quickbasic which was compiled in DOS as a kid pushed me to learn x86 assembly just to make pixels appear on screen faster. Its slowness was a feature for me in the end.

> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript.

Why JS and not PHP?

they are both guilty

both, depending on adhesive tape usage

PHP stops you from being clever with it by making you angry at times. It's very predictable too, on its hardly avoidable, disgusting pitfalls.

But things may still change for the worse with that process of Scala-ification they are doing to PHP 8.x.

>impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC

As someone whose first exposure to computer programming was BASIC on an Apple II in the early 1980s when I was around 8-9 years old and who later went on to learn multiple other programming languages, I always wondered what about BASIC inspired that particular sentiment. Was it the line numbers? The GOTO statement? The use of "GOSUB.....RETURN" rather than explicit functions?

It was probably the lack of structure like blocks and scopes. Everything is flat and global and GOTO means control can enter and exit at any point.

I tried to answer it in the article that someone recently posted to HN as well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743062

spoilers: There was no GOSUB in the version Dijkstra commented on. There was not even anything else to put in an "THEN" statement than a line number ("THEN 210" is the code). If you wanted to store user's name in your variable, "n" was the name to go with, because "name" was not supported. And so on... :)

Oh, and the line numbers were a necessity.

Interesting, I wasn't aware how much the language had evolved from the mid 1970s through the early 1980s.

However, this line in your article would seem to indicate that GOSUB was available in the original version:

>The first version of the language was extremely limited, compared to any later popular version of BASIC. The only supported keywords apart from math functions were: LET, PRINT, END, FOR...NEXT, GOTO, GOSUB...RETURN, IF...THEN, DEF, READ, DATA, DIM, and REM.

I’m not sure Dijkstras quote had that much of an effect. Visual Basic was one of the most popular languages until Microsoft killed it.

Basic evolved to have blocks, scopes, procedures, and functions. Visual Basic is probably closer to Algol or Pascal than to the original GOTO-only BASIC which Dijkstra was complainig about. VB.Net has the same semantics as C# which means it is one of the most powerful languages available. But it is not really a good beginner language anymore.

"Teamonkey's law" sounds good to me. Whenever BASIC is mentioned, someone will invoke Dijkstra's rant.

>If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript.

I'm not sure about that. The only language that I felt led to bad things from developers was perl, mainly because it was so difficult to read later.

> mainly because it was so difficult to read later

But it wasn't, it was just so easy to write badly early.

> "I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC."

Seems doubtful? In the essay where his famous comment on BASIC appeared ("How Do We Tell Truths That Might Hurt?" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF), Dijkstra took a snarky swipe at many of the major languages of the time: PL/I, COBOL, FORTRAN, APL and COBOL and FORTRAN at least are still around. It was just what in modern parlance would be called a shitpost (no, really, read it), albeit more articulate than most.

(I joke that Real Programmers™ get their shitposts immortalized in ACM publications: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/947923.947924 )

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743062 - starts with this quote and checks whether it even applied to the BASIC we talk about here. Points out at least a few of the advantages of the integrated BASIC environment.

It also never killed it off, and it wasn't a big rant - just a single sentence - either. He also ranted over a few other languages in the same list.

PHP, like JS, sees a lot of unstructured code relying on random global variables in the wild as well :)

> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript.

In its detractors, you mean? (This was a perfectly reasonable comment until you got irrational at the end; even people who understand Dijkstra's comment but feel that we lost something should be extremely pleased that the thing that took BASIC's place is a language that supports structured programming and is otherwise as nice as JS.)

Dijkstra wrote that in 1975 [1]. I don't think it had a major hand in killing off BASIC considering that "peak" BASIC occurred later with the home computer market. The vast majority of home computer users had no clue who Dijkstra was as they happily typed BASIC listings from various magazines and books.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E... - 18th June 1975

> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript

Hahaha. I largely consider JavaScript to be the new BASIC - not because you can learn how to do some fun or useful things with it in an afternoon, but because it is ubiquitous. Web browsers are everywhere, and nearly all of them have JavaScript. A lot of JavaScript's quirkiness and inconvenience seems to derive from its web browser/DOM environment. (It's probably still easier to write GUI apps in Visual BASIC.)

Also: I'm still disappointed that Python 3 removed the print statement, so that

    print "hello, world!"

is no longer a program that works both in BASIC and in Python.

I grew up typing programs from softdisk magazine, Compute! etc... into TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 800, and C-64. I still think JavaScript in a browser is better.

JavaScript is way more powerful than Basic on any of those 4 platforms. The canvas 2D API is way more capable and easy than what came with those systems. Even getting something like

    <input type="text">

Was 50-150 lines of code in BASIC, by which I mean a text input line with a cursor and editing and not just BASIC's "INPUT" command which provided nearly zero editing support.

Libraries like pixi.js or three.js or p5.js etc make it trivial to get fancy graphics on the screen. Making something you can share it with your friends or the entire world with a link, even if they don't own the same type of machine running the same OS. Host them on codepen, jsfiddle, github pages, all free.

I loved my experience with Basic and those old machines but I wouldn't force my kids to learn that way.

Except it's way less discoverable. The BASIC prompt was all you got on some 8 bits computers, so it made playing with it almost mandatory. Also everything was way simpler (less abstractions layers, no network) to grok for a young kid.

And all of your BASIC was in the manual, taught to you as soon as you bought the computer.

I picked BASIC in 3rd grade reading a "stolen" math book. I saw a bunch of 10 line examples in its pages and remembered that weird pc jr. cartridge that said basic. The cartridge seemed useless until that day....

my experience was I would not have learned anything without a manual and examples. There was no autocomplete so there was no discoverabliy and there was no internet so unless you bought a book or happened to have access to a library that had modern basic books you were out of luck.

VS Today wheer there are 1000s of websites that will teach you JavaScript and 1000s of free video classes and hundreds of thousands of free examples. JavaScript is several orders of magnitude more discovable than basic ever was

It's hard to compare these, it's like comparing a shovel to an excavator.

If a browser had to be implemented in 16 KB of binary, and use at most 48kB of RAM when running, many of the APIs you enjoy having would not be there. And it's not even about features of the language itself.

There was a time when you could have both - the language and the functionalities of a browser - IE supported VBScript in script tags:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript">
    <!--
    Sub Button1_OnClick
       MsgBox "Hello world"
    End Sub
    -->
    </SCRIPT>

> accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64

JavaScript is ubiquitous (which is why I consider it to be BASIC's de facto heir), but it's (much) less accessible than BASIC was.

And as good BBSes, user groups, and print magazines may have been for sharing C64 programs, the internet is pretty great for sharing JavaScript programs with people all over the world.

> accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64

It's not the same, it's better.

Author of parent comment here: As a funny side note, my current project for ten years has been JavaScript based :)

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