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A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth_s experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that “It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens 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 (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn_t be so bad if historical accidents hadn_t made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called “BASIC” aren_t quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. —ESR]
BASIC stands for “Beginner_s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later backronym were incorrect.