How many of you are Extreme Programmers?

[Andrew Dalke]

[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