Dijkstra's maxim is both harmful and clueless. Many of the greatest programmers in the world started with BASIC. When I "graduated" from BASIC to Pascal, I very quickly dropped the BASIC approach to program flow, as any software engineer worth their salt would do. Dijkstra infantilizes programmers, as if it wasn't obvious that BASIC's approach is cumbersome and people just keep programming C++ as if it was BASIC...
Once you go to a "proper" programming language, there is nothing to "unlearn". The new approach is so obviously better! At the same time, having an interpreter up within 2 seconds of turning the computer one was AMAZING and got a lot of people interested in programming.
Much of the software world you see today was built by people who started with BASIC!
Once you go to a "proper" programming language, there is nothing to "unlearn". The new approach is so obviously better! At the same time, having an interpreter up within 2 seconds of turning the computer one was AMAZING and got a lot of people interested in programming.
Much of the software world you see today was built by people who started with BASIC!