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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#11

Post by rootedbox »

duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

It's Turing complete.. and my apple II library had all sorts of crazy apps written in basic. I remember taking them apart when I was like 10.. and being like who has the time to write all these lines! Which.. I still think is crazy considering no IDE and how you would just input them line by line... leaving space between lines just in case you needed to put a new line in later.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#12

Post by chuckadams »

pjmlp wrote: post #3

Happy birthday BASIC! A short reminder that the original Dartmouth BASIC was actually JIT compiled, including while using the REPL. And most big iron OSes like VAX/VMS had proper compilers. It was due to the 8 bit home microcomputers that it got the fame of being interpreted, as naturally there is only so much that fits into 16 - 64 KB.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#14

Post by SoftTalker »

rbanffy wrote: post #4

It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.

Certainly did mine. I credit my career in programming to an after-school class in programming BASIC on the TRS-80 when I was in middle school, and then the TI-99/4a I had at home when I was in high school.

I even used BASIC professionally for a while in the 1990s.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#15

Post by marssaxman »

duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

It depends on what you mean by "BASIC". Nobody in that world cared much about portability or standardization, so the language had a protean quality; every vendor offered their own flavor, tailored to the needs of its platform. The variant you used may well have been a mere teaching tool, but there certainly were other dialects which served as serious application development platforms.

I was a big fan of BASIC when I was young, and that led to spending the early portion of my career working on a series of BASIC compilers, all of them intended for complex software development. Two of them still sort of exist, in much-mutated form; one is now called "Xojo", and the other is Microsoft's rather-better-known Visual Basic.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#16

Post by SoftTalker »

ajross wrote: post #7
duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed. Was much commerci…

There was some business use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Basic

Was popular with some smaller companies for their internal custom systems. Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#17

Post by georgeecollins »

duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

VBA was used for tons of enterprise applications in the late '90s and early oughts. The implementation in things like Excel was surprisingly powerful and they had to sort of dial it back because they realized it was a huge security risk. (You could open up a spreadsheet that was a powerful virus.)

In the '90s when we were developing a 3D game (in C++) I made an early iteration of the level designer in VBA on Excel. You would color cells in a spreadsheet and then hit a button, and the button would output a text file that told the game engine what mesh or object to put where. Terrible way to do it, but a great way to work fast in those primitive days.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#18

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which meant a quite good performance, in a memory managed language, and ability to do systems programming. There was nothing missing in VMS Basic, Turbo Basic, QuickBasic, DevPac BASIC, that would make me reach out to C.

On my Apple II's (with AppleSoft BASIC) I missed proper functions and the ability to use a stack. Recursion was next to impossible to express.

Yeah, but that was a 8 bit system, not what made BASIC in first place.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#19

Post by skissane »

ajross wrote: post #7
duxup wrote: post #2

I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed. Was much commerci…

> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little.

There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visual Basic and ASP, Pick/BASIC, HP Business Basic, Wang 2200 Basic, DEC BASIC-PLUS, etc. Boring business software you would likely have never heard of but which was (and in some cases still is) essential to running all kinds of different businesses.

I used to work for a university and both the student administration system and the accounting system were off-the-shelf software, mostly written in VB6 and classic ASP (I believe the vendor also had some COM components written in C++, they had their own app framework, but the business logic was all VB6). At the time, we were waiting for the vendor to finish porting it to VB.NET. 20 years later, it probably still is in VB.NET.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#20

Post by SoftTalker »

pjmlp wrote: post #9
rbanffy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a language, it's very low-level. It has nicer syntax than assembly had, and is relatively portable, but the concepts are all really close to the metal.

Which meant a quite good performance, in a memory managed language, and ability to do systems programming. There was nothing missing in VMS Basic, Turbo Basic, QuickBasic, DevPac BASIC, that would make me reach out to C.

Structured programming was not easy.

You didn't have functions, you had GOSUB to a line number, which was just a slightly glorified GOTO. There was one global scope.

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