[ThrowawayR2]

> "He calls out BASIC specifically because it was ubiquitous and often the only option on the machines novices would have available at the time."

EWD's quote is from 1975 which is just barely the start of the microcomputer era (the Altair 8800 came out in '75 and the Apple II in '77), so he's not referring to those. Most people writing programs would have had access to mainframes and therefore had access to multiple language interpreters and compilers I would think.

[User23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC#Explosive_growth:_the_ho...

[ThrowawayR2]

The Altair 8800 came out in January 1975; Gates and Allen's Altair BASIC, the first microcomputer BASIC, came out "shortly thereafter" and EWD498 was written in June 1975. That's hardly long enough for an explosion. Again, Dijkstra probably had never even heard of either when he penned his missive and it's clear that his opinion of BASIC was well formed even before 1975.