> From: Neil Thompson <albio...@gmail.com> > > I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar > comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to > translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of > programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their > own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends > the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm.
There's definitely truth to this. The main thing that makes a good programmer isn't memorization of language features or syntax, it's good mental organization and thinking habits; the ability and practice of really *thinking through* the steps involved in solving a problem, building a solid mental model of the relevant data structures and algorithms, and then breaking those down into component steps until one arrives at a suitable representation in native-language operations. If someone has a good understanding of that, they can apply it (with varying amounts of blood, sweat, and tears) in any language; if they don't, there's no language in the world that can impart it to them (no matter *what* the flavor-of-the-decade Savior Of All Programming Forever is - "Try Swift! It's the new Pascal!") *That said,* there are definitely some languages that are more conducive to building these habits than others (and, within each group, many that emphasize different aspects more or less strongly.) I can't speak to COBOL as I've never had cause to get any experience with it, but I would say that BASIC (as in, the old-school, unstructured BASICs of the Bad Old Days) really does teach you a bunch of habits that you end up needing to un-learn as soon as you start working with better languages (not even *newer* languages - ALGOL and Lisp both predate it.) Line-#-and-GOTO programming imposes the same burden of bookkeeping and space-management on the programmer as direct machine-code monitor hacking and the most primitive assemblers, but without any rational explanation as to why, so that any novice attempting to create a program of any real complexity ends up being instilled with a superstitious dread over the ludicrous non-question of where to put things - do I space statements N numbers apart? What if I need to add more than N-1 intervening statements later!? Should I place my subroutines on even 1000s for easy reference? Will the line numbers even go high enough!? - the lack of scoped/local variables or any parameter-passing mechanism for GOSUB makes any non-trivial modularization nearly impossible, and the READ/DATA structure is just flat-out demented. And all that mental exhaustion *before* the newbie even gets to the *real* challenges of learning to program! Now, Dijkstra was a self-important ponce given to wild all-or-nothing proclamations and manifestos (manifestes? Manifesti?) and even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his statements quoted here were meant tongue-in-cheek they're still pretty ridiculous. And God knows the Appointed Language Messiah in that great holy war, Pascal, was its own special breed of Hell for novices and experts alike (array size as type qualifier? Just kill me now...) And it's definitely true that plenty of people can and did learn to program in BASIC and still went on to learn better and do Good Things down the line. But there absolutely are such things as bad programming languages.
