BASIC at 50
dartmouth.edu
BASIC at 50
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: BASIC at 50
#2When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS).
Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the source available to tinker with--"open source" of sorts. I remember tweaking GORILLA.BAS when I was 12, altering colors, inserting extra screens and text and silly stuff like that.
I think there's a whole generation that grew up on BASIC. I wonder what today's generation growing up on?
Re: BASIC at 50
#3I'll never forget standing in a K/Wal Mart when I was about 12 years old, standing in front of a Commodore 64. My older brother showed me a simple program that he typed in:
10 PRINT "I AM THE BEST!!!"
20 GOTO 10
Re: BASIC at 50
#4When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…
> I wonder what today's generation growing up on?
Take here to ask the same question.
What hooked me on BASIC was the graphic capabilities. It was relatively easy to create dumb little graphic programs: circles that changed colors and grew, etc.
Re: BASIC at 50
#5"At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964...", says Dartmouth, "time-sharing and BASIC were born."
Well, BASIC was --- but the CTSS timesharing system had already been in use at MIT since the summer of 1963: http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html
There are other earlier systems: JOSS, which featured a rather BASIC-like language, was in service by January, 1964: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOSS
And both JOSS and CTSS had been demoed in earlier form before going into general service --- in fact, the first primitive CTSS demo was in 1961.
Re: BASIC at 50
#6When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…
> I wonder what today's generation growing up on?
Immediately HTML+Javascript comes to mind, as a language interpreter that every kid's computer comes with.
I would guess that is the top "first language" for kids today, with things like C#, Python, Ruby, PHP and Java somewhere in 2nd place (as popular server side and classoom languages).
Re: BASIC at 50
#7Thinking back on BASIC, what stands out most to me are the line numbers. At the time, I never understood the point; I mean, sure, you needed them for GOTO and GOSUB. But it just seemed like so much labor. And, of course, why not labels, names for subroutines? Other languages had them.
But when you think back on how assembly looked and worked at the time, you realize that the line numbers are sort of analogous to addresses in memory. If you were on a 6502, you might JMP to a point in memory. You'd do the same in BASIC, except instead of a point in memory, it was an arbitrary number you used for the line.
So, weirdly, my thoughts on BASIC today is not that it was really BASIC. Not even that it was necessarily a great beginner language, though some people treated it that way. It was an easier shorthand for assembly.
Re: BASIC at 50
#8I starting learning how to write code in '91 (I was 10). My first language was LOGO, but after that I started learning BASIC. I remember trying to find any sort of books I could from the library, that talked about BASIC. It was tough going. I didn't have access to the internet (much less knew what it was). So I had to make do with these books that were often for different dialects of BASIC.
In those days I was enamored with graphics and the idea of creating games, and it was dead simple to do simple graphics in BASIC.
Although I haven't written any code in BASIC in over 10-12 years, it still holds a special place in my heart since it was the language that I used to realize my passion for programming and computers in general. I most definitely wouldn't be where I am today, if it wasn't for BASIC (and QBASIC).
Re: BASIC at 50
#9When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…
When I worked with high schoolers I liked to introduce them to python. The documentation, IMO, is clearly written and easily understood by programming novices. It's got OO, imperative and (limited) functional paradigms available. Graphics are fairly straightforward, for example the built in turtle graphics library. With IDLE it has a good, free, crossplatform IDE that's simple enough to not overwhelm new programmers, but provides every feature you really need. The REPL lets new programmers quickly explore different parts of the language and their programs. And for sticking with primarily imperative code (here I mean that the programmer isn't designing new objects, though they may be making use of existing ones), the syntax is ludicrously straightforward once they get past the mandatory whitespace and spaces versus tabs.
Re: BASIC at 50
#10My first approach to programming was Sinclair BASIC of a ZX Spectrum +3 . I learn soem stuff with a books of "BASIC for childrens", and the ZX spectrum +3 manual.
I remember doing a program to study multiplication tables, printing it, and then asking me for the values... Good old times.