Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!eris.berkeley.edu!mwm
From: mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Basic (Was: Which language to teach first?)
Message-ID: <26995@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 5 Aug 89 03:59:24 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <RON.89Jul28180503@Self.austin.ibm.com> <14501@bfmny0.UUCP> <244@sierra.stanford.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer)
Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica
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In article <244@sierra.stanford.edu> siegman@sierra.UUCP (Anthony E. Siegman) writes:
<I already knew that most of the computer types who denigrate BASIC as
<a programming language haven't in fact looked at a modern BASIC for
<years, if not decades; but it's interesting to see it so clearly
<verified.  Just to bring some of these people up to date, modern
<versions of BASIC, besides being simple and easy to learn (and read
<programs in),

Most. Not all of us.

<The problem -- or the fact -- however is that BASIC IS AND WILL REMAIN
<BY FAR THE BEST CURRENTLY AVAILABLE GENERAL-PURPOSE LANGUAGE TO BE
<LEARNED AND USED BY ORDINARY WORKING ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS WHO WANT
<TO GET REAL WORK -- EVEN RATHER SIZABLE COMPUTATIONS -- DONE ON THEIR
<DESKTOP COMPUTERS.

No, that's not true. I can think of two other languages that are
better than BASIC for that type of thing. Of course, both are
languages that the majority of CS people would denigrate, but that's
another problem.

However, all three languages have one serious problem: there isn't a
standard in widespread use. This means that you probably have to
change all those programs when you upgrade to a newer, faster computer
- unless it's backwards compatable with your old system. This isn't
really acceptable. The "ordinary working engineers and scientists" may
not care - until they realize that they're on hardware that would have
been upgraded years ago, except for their need for that language. This
happened here recently; we kept a PDP-11/70 around years after it
should have gone away, just so people could run BASIC; finding one
that supported all the nonstandard features they used was nontrivial.

<If BASIC is supplanted by anything else for those
<sorts of users in the future, it won't be by Pascal, or Scheme, or C,
<or Modula, or anything similar, it will be Mathematica.

I doubt that. Similar things have been around for years (SMP comes to
mind), and haven't taken off. To paraphrase: I don't know what
language they'll be using in the year 2000, but it'll be called BASIC.
(Unless, of course, it's called FORTRAN :-).

	<mike
--
He was your reason for living				Mike Meyer
So you once said					mwm@berkeley.edu
Now your reason for living				ucbvax!mwm
Has left you half dead					mwm@ucbjade.BITNET