BASIC

BASIC (acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use, originally designed in 1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed at Dartmouth College, America.

Quotes

• 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.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975). Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.

• The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, "The Threats to Computing Science", ACM 1984 South Central Regional Conference, November 16–18, Austin, Texas. EWD898.

• Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.
  • Alan Kay, quoted in Stuart Feldman, A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue 2:9 (Dec/Jan 2004-2005).

External links

Wikibooks

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of

BASIC Programming