Do aspiring programmers benefit from learning BASIC (or a variant) first?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

I'd personally say you learn a lot better coding in Pascal and it's not that much harder (though it is a lot stricter).

Pascal was fantastic, that's how I learned programming. And why I love Google's Go language nowadays, it has a very strong Pascal vibe doing as much as possible with as little syntax as possible. But was that available for the machines that are in context here?

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Pascal was fantastic, that's how I learned programming. And why I love Google's Go language nowadays, it has a very strong Pascal vibe doing as much as possible with as little syntax as possible. But was that available for the machines that are in context here?

There were definitely variants of Pascal for the Spectrum and Amstrad (Hisoft for example). I'd be surprised if there wasn't for the C64. Compiled languages really did need better storage than cassette to be usable though, so that was a limitation on largely tape based systems.

[DanScott]

BASIC (i first encountered it on ZX81 then ZX Spectrum), certainly gave me insight into programming logic (that's a really important concept to think about). Sure there was no OOP in basic, but then there isn't in assembly either.

I'd say that the initial foray into basic definitely helped the next step up to assembly on Amiga (with a few years concentrating on gfx between)

[DanScott]

Nowadays, my day to day paid work is C# which is the best language ever created. really!