https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
[...] Prior to BASIC, programming languages like Fortran, Algol, and COBOL proved complex and were primarily used by professionals. Kemeny and Kurtz saw a need for amateurs who were not dedicated computer engineers to be able to use computers as well. Their journey to create a more user-friendly language began in 1956 with Dartmouth Simplified Code (DARIMSCO), followed by the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment (DOPE). While DOPE proved too simple to be of much use, the lessons learned from these projects informed the development of BASIC, which started in 1963.
[...] The impact of BASIC extended far beyond Dartmouth's campus. As part of the deal to buy the GE computer, the undergraduates built the operating system in BASIC for General Electric's version of time-sharing. This allowed colleges, high schools, and individuals across the country to dial into mainframe computers and write programs using BASIC.
In 1975, Paul Allen and Bill Gates adapted the language for personal computers like the Altair 8800, expanding its reach to a new audience of small computer owners and founding Microsoft in the process. In 1976, Steve Wozniak developed a BASIC interpreter from scratch for the Apple I using self-taught methods and minimal resources. This became Integer BASIC for the Apple II a year later, and BASIC (as Applesoft BASIC) remained a key part of the Apple II throughout the platform's lifespan.
[...] Today, BASIC remains popular in hobbyist retrocomputing circles, but few use it as a practical language. And yet it never truly died out—instead, it continued to evolve.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday May 05, @08:48AM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-BASIC [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications [wikipedia.org]
I even wrote some VBA just a few months ago to edit hyperlinks in a spreadsheet. Though with Office 2024 being just around the corner they might also ship Python like they're already doing with Office/365... Either way, BASIC is still the only option for some still-shipping products.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05, @01:05PM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC#Compilers_and_interpreters [wikipedia.org]
Dozens of versions...
(Score: 3, Touché) by RamiK on Sunday May 05, @02:24PM
Yeah I didn't want to link that list since it hasn't been updated since "June 2016" so I only mentioned the ones I know people are actually buying and using.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by namefags_are_jerks on Monday May 06, @08:01AM
The article writer really didn't think much of how BASIC was (a teacher-directed but) Undergraduate-developed project that multiple classes put together over several years. Documentaries on the language have mentioned that Kemeny and Kurtz didn't (want to) have much influence over the actual language and left to to the students.
That certainly contributed to BASIC's success in getting non-professional computer users to take it up - 'a computer language by Beginners for Beginners', practically.
(Score: 2) by kreuzfeld on Monday May 06, @02:54PM (3 children)
I also started programming as a kid with BASIC. What would people say is the modern equivalent? My best bet would be Python, but I wonder whether it somehow doesn't quite have the same easy, introductory feel that BASIC did.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday May 06, @07:26PM
I also started as a kid with BASIC in high school. I impressed my high school teacher. I started doing neat things. Then I got Dunning-Krugered thinking I could do anything with BASIC! As I entered college I didn't know how much I didn't know about other languages. That was an eye opener. Especially Pascal. I realized it was possible to reason about more complex problems if your language gave you much more powerful primitives to work with. I re-learned this lesson about a decade later with Common Lisp.
I thought Common Lisp was the first interactive language I had seen since BASIC. But I didn't think it was for beginners. In the 1990s I discovered Python, liked it, but didn't do much with it. However I did see it as a potential replacement for BASIC as an introductory language.
However you end up with a new generation of programmers who never had to implement sorting and searching and other algorithms for themself -- out of necessity.
With modern TVs you don't have to worry about braking the yolk on the back of the picture tube.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday May 07, @02:47PM
I'm going with Python. Python is "fairly simple" and there are a lot of beginner computer classes that use Python. For very young kids where you want to focus on logic, something like Scratch seems like an interesting thing to introduce.
print("Hello World!")
There's this interesting github repository as well which is a re-implementation of BASIC games into modern languages: https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games [github.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday May 09, @08:55PM
The BASICs we started with on 8-bit micros back in the 80s were very primitive, unless you were rich and could afford a BBC Micro, which had structured BASIC with an inline assembler. For the rest of us, it was just line numbers and GOTO, FOR/NEXT and GOSUB/RETURN. IF x > 0 THEN GOTO 100. ELSE was a luxury. There were no local variables. Some BASIC dialects had functions, but they were limited to evaluating mathematical expressions. They were also incredibly slow, being interpreted. It was very difficult to write reusable code. Then along came FORTH and blew the doors off.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].