Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : Bob Worm
Date : Mon Jan 08 2024 04:54 pm

  Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
  By: Dr. What to tenser on Mon Jan 08 2024 08:05:19

 > I learned BASIC on my own.  But by the end of High School, I had already
 > "discovered" Structured Programming (before I even knew who Edsger Dijkstra
 > was), using GOSUB and minimizing GOTOs.  Commodore BASIC didn't have
 > WHILE/WEND loops until much later.

I spent a lot of my time ages 8-12 poking and bodging around in BASIC, I persisted because I enjoyed it but I barely understood what an array was so you can imagine the code quality. I sometimes think life could have been much different if my parents had bought me *one* book on the basics of coding... or even borrowed one from the library! Then ditched that to play games for a few years before briefly applying my amazing spaghetti code skills to x86 assembler.

Leaving to university still not really sure why GOTOs were bad was probably not an ideal starting position!

BobW
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