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At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Those innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world.
Dartmouth's BASIC at 50 anniversary celebration was held yesterday, which included the public premier of a documentary on the history and impact of BASIC.
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Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:14PM
you can step on the javascript "stone" just as easily. Except javascript allows one to progress beyond beginner concepts
What can javascript do that BASIC can't? I've written word processors, graphis programs, and games in BASIC back in the eighties. When the interpreter was too slow I'd simply translate it to assembly; simple because they're so similar. I used javascript in the late '90s and early '0s and found it clumsy and far easier to write buggy code with. I just can't see javascript being a first language.
I disagree with Dijkstra, not just about BASIC but COBOL and FORTRAN as well, though I admit I never used either of the latter much. I have no experience with APL so hold no opinion on that.
Fortunately, I obtained a PASCAL compiler for it before the brain-rot took hold
Yet you still agree that it's brain rotting? Even though it never rotted yours? I've programmed in several languages, beginning with BASIC, and did database programming at work for over a decade in NOMAD (a mainframe program), dBase, FoxPro and Clipper.
Javascript was the last language I did any serious programming in (hated the last 5 years of my career, they switched to MS Access). Now that I'm retired I'm writing novels and short stories instead of code.
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 01 2014, @02:52PM
Got lucky. My first 3 weeks of Pascal resulted in huge main program blocks, with a small number of procedures (if any). Took me half a year to understand the concept of "record" (the Pascal's "struct") - equal-length "parallel" arrays of individual "fields" were coming "natural" to my mind (after FORTRAN's common blocks and BASIC's dims experience).
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday May 01 2014, @06:26PM
I don't know Pascal so don't know if its records and fields are the same as database languages, but they came easy to me, just a different kind of array than BASIC uses.
Impeach Donald Palpatine and his sidekick Elon Vader
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 01 2014, @10:59PM
Pascal record is the equivalent of C struct. Don't have an equiv in Basic, so can't use an array of structs but multiple arrays of individual fields that one uses to "assemble" the structs at runtime.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford