Comment by picofarad

1 day ago

I'm not a new Hacker News user. I just had surgery and I don't feel like getting up and looking up my password.

I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.

So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.

Until Python, technically.

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picofarad

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alnwlsn  1 day ago

Technically I learned the drag and drop Lego Mindtorms first. Don't know what kind of habit forming research there is about that.

Any of them are a big step from "computer is just for MS PAINT" to "wow, it actually did something I told it to".

By the time I got to the Z80 stuff I had abandoned basic (though learning C from Arduino is also something people tend not to recommend). Once I learned some Z80 assembly and I encountered BASIC again, I was struck by how similar assembly language and BASIC are, specifically the setting variables and then jumping around all the time part. They taught this stuff to kids!