programming-for-dummies

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Teaching Languages
To help you understand the goals of different programming languages and
the methods they use to achieve these goals, consider the different categories
of programming languages.
Teaching Languages
The goal of teaching languages is to teach novices how to program for the
first time, so teaching languages tend to be simple to learn and easy to
understand. (Common sense might tell you that all programming languages
should be simple to learn and easy to understand, but they’re not. Languages,
like C and C++, are designed for maximum computer efficiency whereas programmer
efficiency is secondary. That’s why C and C++ programs can be so
hard to read and understand.)
Three popular teaching languages include BASIC, Logo, and Pascal. Besides
making programming easy and fun, teaching languages also try to help you
understand general programming principles that you can apply no matter
what programming language you might later wish to know.
Getting back to BASIC
Back in 1963, programming was difficult because you had to know how the
computer worked before you could write a program. As a result, only scientists,
engineers, and mathematicians tended to program a computer.
Programming back in the early days of computers meant typing commands
on a series of punch cards and feeding the punch cards into the computer.
Then you had to return an hour later (or sometimes even overnight) to see
the results of your program. If you made just one mistake, your program
wouldn’t run. Then you’d have to correct that one mistake and try to run
your program again. If the computer found a second mistake, it wouldn’t run
the program either, and you’d have to try again. Needless to say, programming
like this was tedious, slow, and frustrating.
At Dartmouth University, two professors, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz,
decided that non-scientists could also benefit from computer programming
by writing programs for themselves. (Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians
tended only to write programs for themselves too, but how many ordinary
people could use a program that would calculate a quadratic equation?)
Both John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz have created an “official” version of
BASIC called True BASIC (www.truebasic.com). Despite this official version
of BASIC, many other companies, such as Microsoft, have created variations,
or dialects, of BASIC. These BASIC dialects — like Visual Basic and REALbasic —
are actually more commonly used than the official True BASIC version.