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0 pointssmacktoward6y ago0 comments

> The early interpreted BASICs did make it difficult to write good code. All source editing was line editing, every line was numbered, there weren't any structured control flow statements, composite data structures were limited to arrays and strings...

The sad part is that, because BASIC was supposed to be the "easy" programming language, it was frequently used as the language in which students were taught how to program. Which meant its bad habits ended up getting impressed hard onto a lot of impressionable minds. I spent years fixing all the ways first learning to program in BASIC had bent my brain.

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mschaef6y ago

I managed to avoid most of that, thanks to a bit of sheer, dumb luck.

Back in the early 80's, my elementary school piloted a program (inspired by Seymour Papert, I presume) to teach school age children to program in Logo. So we had a lab full of twelve C64's across the hall from the Apple ][ lab and were taught to program in Logo. This included structured control flow, sub programs, recursion and the like. It was a far, far better experience than I imagine it would've been to be initially exposed to Basic.

In retrospect, this is probably a big part of why, a few years later, I found some of the structured programming facilities of QB4 as appealing as I did.

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