BASIC turns 60
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BASIC turns 60
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Re: BASIC turns 60
#2I 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?
Re: BASIC turns 60
#3Happy 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.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#4It'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.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#5Happy 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.
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.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#6I 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?
Plenty, outside 8 bit computing, BASIC was structured and had enough compilers to chose from.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#7I 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 commercial software written in BASIC? (Edit, because this is being misunderstood: I'm not talking about the evolved BASICs being pushed by the late 80's, only about the ones like Applesoft and GWBASIC the commenter is asking about) No, very little. As you point out BASIC doesn't offer much to developers who already understand a macro assembler. But the market was much bigger than that.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#8An amazing book about the history and evolution of BASIC:
Endless Loop: The History of the BASIC Programming Language by Mark Jones Lorenzo
Re: BASIC turns 60
#9Happy 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.
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.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#10Earlier 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.
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.