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Date:Mon Nov 14 17:03:47 1992 
Subject:Re: Ok, so pop *pop* may be a valid lang, but where's basic? 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID:921114.18 

zeta%tcscs@idss.nwa.com (Gregory Youngblood), one of several
defenders of BASIC in this thread, writes:

> Date: 14 Nov 92 00:34:25 GMT
> Organization: TCS Consulting Services
> tlhouse@nyx.cs.du.edu (fiver) writes:
>
> > Basic is where it belongs, in the alt., just like you said .. I don't know
> > from pop, but I *DO* know Basic is pretty much garbage when compared to
> > other GOOD languages ..
> > ....

> I do know BASIC is used for some Windows applications now, and QuickBasic
> is used by several places for specific programs.  In fact several ads looking
> for BASIC programmers have been popping up in the local help wanted sections.

I don't personally know any modern BASIC, but I recently watched my
son use one just before he left school (I think it was called
something like GFA BASIC) on an Atari (he also knows C, C++, Pascal,
and some other languages). It seemed to be very good for his
purposes, i.e. developing graphical software.

It is quite clear that for certain purposes Basic has advantages
similar to Pop-11, i.e. very rapid development, prototyping,
debugging because it is essentially an interactive language (like
Lisp, Prolog, Logo, ML, and various others, and unlike C, C++,
Pascal, Ada, etc.)

I don't know of any versions of BASIC that have the full facilities
of Pop-11 or Lisp, (all the data-types, garbage collector,
convenient list processing syntax, etc.) but for applications where
those facilities are not needed I would expect a well-structured
BASIC to be a better language for software development and testing
than certain other more widely used languages!

However, it's ultimately up to the people who do the actual work.
The difference in productivity between the very best programmers and
the average ones is enormous, and I suspect that the language they
use makes only a marginal difference by comparison. This could be a
topic for interesting research, except that it is totally infeasible
to get some brilliant programmers to learn and use a new language
for several months just for the sake of experiment.

Aaron
--
-- 
Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
EMAIL   A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk  OR A.Sloman@bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-(0)21-414-3711       Fax:   +44-(0)21-414-4281