[batch12]

> and "BASIC mutilates programmers" lines of thinking have done so much damage to the way we, as an engineering community, think about the role of computation in society.

I learned BASIC when I was about 7 years old by reading the books and banging out code. When I didnt have access to a computer, I wrote the code on paper and entered it later. I can say that it was very hard for me to wrap my head around the C style syntax after a few years of immersion as a kid. I did get over it and I think that the problem helped me develop a deeper understanding of programming concepts. So maybe both can be true?

[PaulHoule]

As a 10 year old reading BYTE magazine what seemed common to C, FORTH, and LISP was that one could add new "words" to the language. It was quite a while before I really got that there was a difference between functions, functions that take functions as arguments (or return values), and functions that take expressions as arguments (or return values.)