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BASIC: /bay'·sic/, n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years
was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra
observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal
Perspective that “It is practically impossible to teach
good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC:
as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration.” This is another case (like
Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a language deliberately
designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can
write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily;
writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits
that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This
wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of
thousands of potential wizards. [1995: Some languages called “BASIC” aren't quite this
nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control
structures and shed their line numbers. —ESR] BASIC stands for “Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
Code”. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later
backronym were incorrect.
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