Best Programming Language

[Boris the Old]

Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002)

However I have to agree with Dijkstra turning someone who began with any dialect of BASIC turning to a great developer in any other computer language will be a "helluva" job.

Back around 1972, during my IBM days, I heard him speak at the University of Toronto - "Synchronizing Primitives" as I recall. It was interesting, but not earth shattering, since we were already using the techniques at the IBM lab.

He obviously had a big influence on computational theory, but accusing software developers of being brain dead if they learned their trade on COBOL or BASIC, was elitist, to say the least. It's like saying that someone who first learns to ride a bicycle will never make a good Formula One driver.

Using formal methods to prove the validity of a program, and even create the code, is an objective that is doomed to failure. It's impossible to know all the variables that can influence a system or the behaviours to be performed in response to these unknown inputs. I've often wondered if Dijkstra actually wrote any real-world programs -- he might have had a different view of the world if he'd written a few BASIC programs.

Rod

[sean_vn]

It's been shown that if you don't have goto then many complex continue,break style instructions are necessary. I don't know how Dijkstra's personal opinion became law. I think Trump's opinion on the matter would be equally as good.

[Boris the Old]

Us hotshot ASM programmers at IBM had our own name for Dijkstra's concepts -- Structured Spaghetti code. Lots of global variables to track program status while we backed out of nested procedure calls.

It's no wonder that modern software is still as complex and buggy as it ever was. It's certainly no easier to maintain.

Rod

[Boromir]

If it has to be easy FreeBASIC is not a bad option at all for a beginner. However I have to agree with Dijkstra turning someone who began with any dialect of BASIC turning to a great developer in any other computer language will be a "helluva" job.

No offense, but that just isn't true.
Just because someone starts in Qbasic of FreeBasic does not mean they will have a hard time moving on to something else.
A programmer, no matter what language he uses, will learn to think logically. Programming languages are just a different methods of expressing this inner thought.
If you condemn FreeBasic then C would go down with it because they can almost translate to each other directly. The inner thought that someone uses between these languages is the same. Just a different vocabulary.
A "C" programmer won't have an advantage over a "FreeBasic" programmer just because of the way his language expresses things.

I'm not saying FreeBasic is the best option. There are many valid reasons not to pick freebasic but that is not one.
Available Libraries, Community Size, Support, Speed and Features are valid reasons that you can use to decide which language to use depending on ones needs. I like FreeBasic because it has a very clean and logical structure that can be read much like psuedo code.

[marcov]

Using formal methods to prove the validity of a program, and even create the code, is an objective that is doomed to failure. It's impossible to know all the variables that can influence a system or the behaviours to be performed in response to these unknown inputs. I've often wondered if Dijkstra actually wrote any real-world programs -- he might have had a different view of the world if he'd written a few BASIC programs.

Edsger Dijkstra was a leading Algol developer, mostly on Burroughs. Afaik both involved in programming in it, as the development of the related compilers