Joe Bloe (Adelaide, South Australia)

[Pope Alfred]

BASIC sucks balls. Procedural programming at its worst with even worse garbage collection and shoddier coding practices. An in the words of one of my CS heroes:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. " -- Edsger Dijkstra

I wrote a lot of Basic on the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Master, then I went on to assembler on both. After a while I began to sell a lot of machine-code software to BBC magazines, and for some years I had my own regular slot in Beebug magazine. Assembler became second nature. However, if I'd gone on to another high-level language, maybe I would have found that Basic had spoilt me. I can't tell.
Still, Basic was great fun and gave thousands of ordinary folks access to something new and exciting.