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BASIC turns 60

arstechnica.com

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#91

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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…

> technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's

The outfit I worked for at the time sold directly into this area. We had a product line of simple I/O modules for physical automation (measuring temperatures, controlling motors, etc...) and all our programming instructions and examples were given in BASIC because it was on all computers and it was the one language that we knew everyone would be familiar with.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#92

Post by phone8675309 »

jonplackett wrote: post #36
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.

I don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch. Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug. BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.

When I was in high school (around 2000) they had three CS courses that kids could take - the first was in QBasic, the second was in Turbo Pascal, and the third was in C++ for the AP CS exam.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#93

Post by Narishma »

georgeecollins wrote: post #17
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. Y…

IIRC the first couple of versions of the Unreal Engine editor were written in VB.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#94

Post by phone8675309 »

seryoiupfurds wrote: post #41

Having QBASIC right there and available to play with was my introduction to programming as a curious 11 year old. I remember reading every topic in the help browser over and over looking for how to write to the screen, because I didn't want my first program to waste paper with the PRINT statement. One section of the manual told me to use labels instead of old fashioned line numbers, but I could never figure out the s…

I remember specifically being excited to have QBASIC when my parents got our first PC. This comment reminded me of that excitement.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#95

Post by jay_kyburz »

jonplackett wrote: post #36
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.

I don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch. Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug. BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.

> don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch.

Because there is no such thing as a syntax error in scratch. 10 year olds are not great at typing, spelling, or paying attention to the small details.

Scratch rules out a whole class of bugs and allows the kids to jump right into solving the interesting problems.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#96

Post by boznz »

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?

Gorillas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game) )

Re: BASIC turns 60

#97

Post by JohnFen »

Ahh, BASIC. I still consider it a bit of a naughty language.

When I first learned to program as a child, it was in Pascal (on a mainframe... microcomputers were barely a thing back then). Our instructor expressly forbade us from learning BASIC because "it would teach us bad habits".

That which is forbidden becomes attractive, of course, so a bunch of us kids started getting together on our own and we all learned BASIC on the sly. It felt so... wrong... and delicious. Forbidden knowledge is fun knowledge.

That's how BASIC became the second high level programming language I learned.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#98

Post by ykonstant »

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?

I wrote tons of cryptography and cryptanalysis code in a combination of assembly and BASIC on MS-DOS.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#99

Post by tristor »

Learning QBASIC with assistance from my dad on our family Tandy PC when I was 4-6 years old was a major driver for my career in technology later in life. Who else remembers the simple game Gorillas that came with QBASIC with its source code visible to read? That was a key inspiration for some of my early programs.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#100

Post by refset »

travem wrote: post #73

SQL also turns 50[1] today, I think that it has much wider active usage today than many of its contemporaries. [1] Archive of "SEQUEL: A STRUCTURED ENGLISH QUERY LANGUAGE" https://web.archive.org/web/20070926212100/http://www.almade...

It's great how the very first SQL query in that paper is still completely valid and runs on countless implementations:

> SELECT NAME FROM EMP WHERE DEPT = 'TOY'

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