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.
[glossary]