BASIC
:BASIC: /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for
Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which
for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers.
Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A
Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good
programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as
potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal
of the cascading
lossage
that happens when a language deliberately designed as an
educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC
programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything
longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make
it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad
if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in
the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential
wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more,
having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and
shed their line numbers. --ESR]
BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code".
Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later backronym
were incorrect.
Jargon File Version 4.3.1, 29 JUN 2001 =
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