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== BASIC Considered Harmful (Sidebar) ==

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Edsgar W. Dijkstra, of "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful," was not at all a fan of the BASIC programming language in which 10 PRINT is written. He wrote in a 1975 letter, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?," which was eventually published in 1985: "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" (EWD 498).

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Edsgar W. Dijkstra, of "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful," was not at all a fan of the BASIC programming language in which 10 PRINT is written. He wrote in a 1975 letter, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?," which was published in 1982: "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" (EWD 498).

The statement appears amid other one-sentence jabs at programming languages (FORTRAN, PL/I, COBOL, and APL), IBM, and projects to allow "natural language" programming. In a 1984 keynote address, "The Threats to Computing Science," he said, similarly, that "the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery" (EWD898). In both cases, his statements are not part of arguments, nor are they elaborated at all. They are simple denunciations of BASIC -- no doubt resonant with many computer scientists and no doubt of some tactical value at the time, when the structured programming that predominates today and that Dijkstra was advocating was still being questioned.

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@@ Line 174: / Line 174: @@
 == BASIC Considered Harmful (Sidebar) ==
-Edsgar W. Dijkstra, of "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful," was not at all a fan of the BASIC programming language in which 10 PRINT is written. He wrote in a 1975 letter, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?," which was eventually published in 1985: "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" (EWD 498).
+Edsgar W. Dijkstra, of "GOTO Statement Considered Harmful," was not at all a fan of the BASIC programming language in which 10 PRINT is written. He wrote in a 1975 letter, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?," which was published in 1982: "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" (EWD 498).
 The statement appears amid other one-sentence jabs at programming languages (FORTRAN, PL/I, COBOL, and APL), IBM, and projects to allow "natural language" programming. In a 1984 keynote address, "The Threats to Computing Science," he said, similarly, that "the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery" (EWD898). In both cases, his statements are not part of arguments, nor are they elaborated at all. They are simple denunciations of BASIC -- no doubt resonant with many computer scientists and no doubt of some tactical value at the time, when the structured programming that predominates today and that Dijkstra was advocating was still being questioned.