Re: BASIC Turns 60

On Wed, 1 May 2024 23:57:30 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Frankly, I’m quite happy to see it relegated to a museum. There are
much better alternatives for anything you might imagine BASIC could do
nowadays.

BASIC's biggest strength ended up becoming its downfall, ironically.
Its accessibility led to its ubiquity, but that happened while the rest
of the world was undergoing major shifts in programming-language
design, so that by the time people decided they were ready to be done
with line numbers and type-signifier punctuation, it was too late to do
anything about it; the "standard" had fossilized around early MS BASIC.

(Even by the mid-'80s there were (relatively) modern BASIC dialects out
there, but only QBasic/Visual Basic achieved much acceptance, and those
were limited to MS's corner of the world.)

But it's hard to overstate its importance in the democratization of
programming and computing in general. While it takes time and effort to
learn how to program *well,* and most who did were quick to leave it
for something cleaner and/or more powerful, the fact that any fool
could learn to write a BASIC program (and have a reasonable chance of
running it on almost anything) was *absolutely* a cornerstone of the
personal-computer revolution.

(I, personally, work at a software company that's been around since the
mid-'90s. Our founding developers were an accountant and an auto
mechanic, who had no more education in computer science than the
standard intro-to-data-processing courses of the late '70s-early '80s;
but having an easily-comprehensible if slightly-janky tool for rapid
prototyping and development like VB allowed them to get in on a
burgeoning market at the right time. God only knows where we'd be if
they'd had to learn Win16 programming in C; I took one look at that,
back when, and ran screaming for the hills.)

Myself, I'm fond of FreeBasic as a quick-'n-dirty solution for writing
small utilities, these days... ;)