n. A programming language, originally designed for
Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the
early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of
brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like
Pascal) of the bad things that happen when a language
deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too
seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of
10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very
painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will bite him/her later
if he/she tries to hack in a real language. This wouldn't be so
bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end
micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential
wizards a year.
