How many of you are Extreme Programmers?

[Michele Simionato]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<b7q72i$nvh$1 at slb6.atl.mindspring.net>...
> [Aahz, on Dijkstra's BASIC quote]
> 
> Peter Hansen:
> > Perhaps only once
> > she advances beyond the student stage, and has some years of actual
> > _practice_, will she discard the early mental mutilation of BASIC
> > and find her way to Good Style.
> 
> I too learned programming starting with BASIC.  I started with
> the manual which came with my TI 99-4/A some 20+ years ago,
> and didn't give BASIC up until 12 years ago.  I think my last big
> BASIC program was a X-ray crystallography program, with a
> GUI to lay out and assign the lines, etc.
> 
> One thing to note, which Dijkstra didn't predict, is that I stopped
> using a 'traditional' BASIC back in '86, when I got a copy of
> QuickBasic for my birthday.  No line numbers, real functions,
> better control structures, compiled code - while editing in the
> IDE, so the compile-link-run cycle is really fast.  Quite nice,
> and after that and Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, going to K&R
> C on a unix machine was like a step back into darkness.
> 
> Anyway, so it is possible to get Good Style even under
> BASIC.  (Shhh!  And I think my BASIC background is
> one reason I like Python so much. ;)
> 
>                     Andrew
>                     dalke at dalkescientific.com

+1

I started with a Casio pocket calculator and then switched to AmigaBasic,
but essentially my experience is the same of yours. I also felt programming
in C on Unix was a step back into darkness. Happily, I found Python, with
its nice 

print "Hello World" 

that made me feel at home ;)

                                             Michele