BASIC Computer Language Turns 40

5 REM nam37 codes
10 PRINT "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical"
20 PRINT "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness"
30 PRINT "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even"
40 PRINT "the school's janitors could use it."
50 END

missing line

GOTO 10

Re:missing line

shouldn't that be:

10 PRINT "First Post"
20 GOTO 10

Re:Today we use Bash

At first I was considering having my sig in BASIC:

10 PRINT "Jorkapp is a Programmer"
20 GOTO 10

but it was too - Basic. IMO, my sig in C is more 1337.

Re:Today we use Bash

Better to use something like

int main() { /* i wish this thing would indent properly */
for (1;1;1) { /* will loop forever */
printf("ajs318 is a better programmer than Jorkapp\n");
};
};

Repeatedly calling main() from within main() probably would overflow the stack. It's the equivalent of using GOSUB in BASIC when you meant GOTO -- GOSUBs and function calls have to remember where they were called from, which is what a stack is used for. If the compiler you were using was tolerant enough that you could declare void main(), then it would last about twice as long before crashing and burning, due to not having to temporarily remember an integer it's later going to have to throw away.

Re:Today we use Bash

I've never understood why you use a for loop for something like that and not a "while (1)". Can someone clue me in?

while(1) sounds like the Queen talking.

Re:missing line

10 print "BASIC? Boy does that ring a..." 20 print CHR$(7) 30 goto 10

It feels like elementary school again

10 ? "CmdrTaco and Kathleen stting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G";
15 ? CHR$(7)
20 goto 10

Re:missing line

On a Spectrum or BBC micro, you will get a "no such variable" error -- the British BASIC dialects tended to prefer to crash out rather than silently assign 0 to variables on first reading. Although, "X = X + 1" will still work without predefining X, because the interpreter creates a variable X as soon as it sees it on the left-hand side of an assignment. Spectrum BASIC expected every statement to start with a keyword (verb), accessed by pressing a letter key, and so had to introduce "LET" for assignments -- "X = 1" would have to be written "LET X = 1" on the Spectrum because if you pressed X when a keyword was expected, you would get CLEAR.

BASIC Sex Ed

Don't forget to PEEK before you POKE!

A Poem!

10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program"
30 GOTO 10

Re:A Poem!

10 PRINT "Not haiku" 20 PRINT "Instead, Senryu" 30 PRINT GOTO 10

Re:A Poem!

Problem finally solved!...

10 GOTO 30
20 REM ???
30 PRINT "PROFIT!"

Re:A Poem!

Mod parent down, a Haiku is 575 not 343 (is program 3 or 4? If 4 then 353, either way it's wrong)

Mod yourself down. You forgot to pronounce the line numbers.

Re:A Poem!

On a slightly offtopic note, I think slashcode should allow us to mod down our own posts. I mean, when I'm trolling or flaming, I do it knowingly (most of the time at least). If I could already mod myself down, it would be beneficial so that the moderators are not disturbed by my post. They would save their mod points to mod up interesting content instead of modding down garbage.

Re:A Poem!

10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program"
30 GOTO 10

Ten print this is a (5)
twen-ty print hai ku pro gram (7)
thir-ty go to ten (5)

Re:A Poem!

Interestingly, this post is modded up, while another one from two minutes earlier is modded down.

Just goes to show you, like comedy, its all in the timing. ;)

Re:A Poem!

Depends who you ask. Some think that in English, they should be 3-5-3 instead.

No kidding. 17 syllables is a lot of room to maneuver in English... far, far less in Japanese.

Ever try watching anime with both the English subtitle and the English dubbing turned on? A Japanese character will say something subtitled, e.g., "I'm cold" and they'll have to dub in something like, e.g., "I feel cold. It's cold in this room!" just to make the syllable count come close.

Re:Look at all these posts.

Here's a clue kiddies
Haiku in English is dumb
Add last line next time

;)

Learn to count!

The program's source is the haiku, not its output.

Re:A Poem!

Pu-ro-gu-ra-mu. Five syllables. :P

Re:Look at all these posts.

But none will offer anything but the verbatim dronings of their professors, which they seem to feel are gods. Forgive my condescending chuckle.

I think you'll find that literary critical academics are well aware of the preferences of certain languages for certain poetic techniques.

Hexameter (six stress verse) is considered wonderful in French early modern poetry, and almost always terrible in English early modern poetry (Sidney uses it, but his hexameter isn't given particularly great credit).

Quantitative measure is considered to have worked wonderfully in classical Greek, but is accepted as essentially impossible in English (Coleridge semi-successfully attempted it in Christabel).

A Petrarchan sonnet's composition in English is an exercise in frustration and a Shakespearean sonnet's structure in Italian uncomfortably abrupt.

They had a dream

Obviously they failed, and so they created BASIC instead.

Re:They had a dream

But without BASIC would we have QBASIC and that nifty gorilla-banana-chunking program?

And now we have ...

... BASIC's much acclaimed successor, Visual Basic ;-)

Re:And now we have ...

I tried Audible Basic, but it wasn't very good. Tactile Basic wasn't too bad, but please... please, for the sake of the children, stay away from Olfactory Basic.

Janitors are programmers too!

yet simple enough that even the school's janitors could use it

And that, children, is where the seeds of garbage collection were sowed.

-Adam

Re:Spinning in his grave

That's a very obvious statement. You basically said that a bad program written in one language could have been written better in the other language. But any program written badly in any language is going to be better when written better, regardless of language.

The comparison I believe the original post was making was between a good VB app and a good C app and between those, I'm guessing the C one would be better.
-N

5 REM Testing..

10 PRINT "I hearby declare..."
20 PRINT "that all comments in this story"
30 PRINT "be typed in basic"
40 END

Re:5 REM Testing..

10 REM "In that case, they should be comments."
20 END

Re:5 REM Testing..

System.out.println("10 PRINT \"Hell\"");
System.out.println("GOTO 10");

Re:5 REM Testing..

> 10 PRINT "I hearby declare..."
> 20 PRINT "that all comments in this story"
> 30 PRINT "be typed in basic"
> 40 END

1 PRINT "FUCK YOU"<BR>
2 GOTO 1<BR>
3 REM ITS BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE I DID THAT TO A VIC-20<BR>
4 REM AND THEY STILL DONT LET ME IN THAT MALL

1K Adventure

This one used to tie people up for a few minutes...

10 PRINT "You are in a cave."
20 PRINT "Go N, S, E OR W?"
30 INPUT A$
40 GOTO 10

School Janitors

Ooo. Me Grandpa was a custodian and a very smart man. Watch your mouth. I work for a school and the janitors here are smart folks too. Most of all, they treat the lowly tech guy with respect in spite of his job and the fact that he lives in his parents basement and has never touched a girl (not a real girl anyway).

Edsger Dijkstra? Does not like it

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra/

What it really means is that the programmers won't program exactly the way Dij wants them to do. It is not "good" or "bad": just different. Programming should not be a straitjacket: the more options and the more different ways to do thing, the better. Those who think that there is no place for anything like a GOTO should look at html.

Re:Troll? Moi?

GOTO's make spaghetti code. It is very hard to trace through, especially if the code is uncommented. If you end up with a bug, you will have a very hard time trying to trace through your GOTO's to find it.

Loops and functions keep things neet, organized and structured (assuming a half-competant programmer)

This isnt a point of view thing. Some things are confusing and some arent, thats just the way it is.

Try maintaining code full of goto's. Good luck.

Re:Troll? Moi?

GOTO's make spaghetti code. It is very hard to trace through, especially if the code is uncommented.

Ever tried to sift through someone's OOP program that is poorly documented and methods are badly named? It's just as bad. Ever seen a method that calls six others methods in different objects in it's body which are all overloaded 5 or 6 times? Bad/Sloppy programming spans all languages and isn't confined to a goto statement.

How about poorly named method signatures? For example

String getNumber(String x, int i, boolean q, vector a)

I've seen crap like this before from programmers.

Try maintaining code full of goto's. Good luck.

No it's not the best thing in the world to do, but if it's well documented it's not as bad as you make it out to be. I started out in basic when I was 7, and I work now as a Java programmer. I would gladly take well commented code with GOTO's over poorly done OOP code.

Re:Troll? Moi?

You don't maintain your own programs then, do you?

I've had to maintain programs written by developers who, like you apparently, separated out the maintainability aspects from their concept of "well-written" code.

Well written code does not mean written fast - it means the next guy down the line, after you've moved on and forgotten about it, can easily follow the logic and make changes with minimal effort. GOTO's almost never facilitate this. Please trust your peers on this - it's been debated often enough and long enough by those in the know that it's no longer a subject for reasonable debate. In fact, defending the use of GOTO usually shows one of two things:
1) Inexperience -or-
2) Old Age (meaning the behaviour is so ingrained one simply can't comprehend anything different).

Of course, I'm assuming you have the option to not use GOTO. If the language you use has no control structors other than Jumps and Labels, then obviously you have no choice. But I would argue that even if that's the case, you're probably using an old language for one of two reasons:
1) Not experienced with anything else -or-
2) Too old and stubborn to move on to anything else (meaning the behviour is so ingrained that you probably sit alone in the corner pumping out Cobol not even aware that you were laid off months ago and replaced by the Janitor who took a crash course in Javascript). ;)

Re:WHY! WON'T! IT! DIE!

I've heard it claimed that BASIC was "invented" by Microsoft

Microsoft certainly doesn't claim that.

or that they own it

Nor do they claim that

or that their first product was a BASIC interpreter

They do claim that, because it's true.

What's the connection between MS and BASIC?

BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).

Visual Basic remains one of Microsoft's flagship products. It's philosophy is similar to the original BASIC philosophy: you shouldn't have to be a comp sci graduate to write computer programs. Whether VB succeeds in that regard is another question, but it's what they intended.

BASIC is still Microsoft's language for application automation (think Visual Basic for Applications), Web development (ASP with VBScript), and as a tool control language for gluing together objects written in lower level languages. In a sense, some form of BASIC fills the roles in Windows that Scheme, Perl, and TCL occupy in UNIX.

Re:WHY! WON'T! IT! DIE!

BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).

Actually, they're not. Every copy of Windows XP, and probably Windows 2000 and ME and maybe even 98, ships with the Windows Scripting Host. One of the languages supported by WSH is VBScript ("Visual Basic Script").

VBScript is surprisingly capable. Read more about it here [microsoft.com].

Windows NT, CMD + QBASIC

All versions of OS/2 and Windows NT/2K/XP ships with a copy of qbasic 1.0, while DOS 6, and windoze ME/9x ship with qbasic 1.1.

All of these can be started as an editor, eg QBASIC / EDCOM

On the other hand, only vers 1.1 can read the dos help file HELP.HLP.

Amusingly, Windows understands what a QHELP file is, that if you click on a quickbasic help file, it says 'this is a DOS help file', whereas any other help file (eg 4dos.hlp), it says "unknown format".

In any case, basic shipped with msdos, because in older times, computers had a rom-basic in their bios.

GWBASIC is a standalone emulator for graphical workstations (ie workstations that replaced the rom-basic with video memory).

BASIC in its raw form continues to affect the way that COMMAND.COM and CMD.EXE work. For example, if one does a test, and it is false, the rest of the line is skipped. In the sample below, we see two statements, separated by an &. If one makes the if statement, one gets neither command, while if the statement is true, both work.

if "1"=="1" echo 1 & echo 2

One can implement a die style command by this, or by replacing echo with set, pass a parameter to a subroutine.

if (condition) echo something & goto :end

In any case, it's dodgy.

From the Jargon File

Alright, I'll commence the BASIC-bashing by quoting from the Jargon File:

BASIC

[acronym, from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.

AAAaaaaghhh

Damn I hated numbering each line of code!

And when you had to add something and have uneven spacing of line numbers... Oh it just drives the type A personality in me nuts!

The only good part about line numbers was how easy it made it to write GOTO statements.

And then came VB

Then VB came, and a language was created that was muscular enough to script Word macro viruses, but simple enough to enfuriate good programmers (I mean, really, no short circuit boolean operators? It makes me weep.)

Obligatory Dijkstra quote

"Learning BASIC causes permanent brain damage." -- E.Dijkstra

Nostolgia

Ok, who remembers the Star Trek game from Dartmouth? You know, the one where you got to enter coordinates to move the ship to, then fire photons and phasers at Klingons? You could even consult the library computer! Failing that, who remembers coding the "trench" game?

| * |
| * |
| * |
| * |
|* |
| |
| |
*BOOM* YOU CRASHED. TRY AGAIN? [Y/N]

Re:Nostolgia

You wish is my command. Here's the source code [u-net.com] plus there's a PALM version at the bottom of the list. In case you want to type it in yourself, SmallBASIC [sourceforge.net] accepts traditional BASIC syntax. Someone event did a SmallBASIC [sourceforge.net] port of Super Star Trek for you!

Jave derived from BASIC???

How is that so? Was B derived from basic? I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Smalltalk maybe? I thought the flow went like this:

1. B (short for Bell, where it was written)
2. C
3. Objective-C (C with some smalltalk stuff added)
4. Java

Ah, the memories...

I wrote my very first program in Basic on an 8K PDP-8/I computer ("Hello World!") back in 1975. We had to toggle in the bootstrap instructions using the toggle switches, load the OS from a paper tape and then finally the Basic application off the DECtape drive. I was just amazed at the possibilities and would come in on my own time just to write silly little programs.

Dijkstra said it best ...

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Professor Edsger Dijkstra

Oh yeah and "Goto considered harmful" too, of course.

RIP buddy. :-)

z

Re:Dijkstra said it best ...not

Edsger Dijkstra is all too typical of the arrogant academics who gave rise to Shaw's comment "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach. He's like the academic fanboys who argue that PostgreSQL is a real RDBMS, MySQL can't really be used for anything serious.

Don't believe it, kids. If your brain hasn't been ruined by age 7, you can unlearn any bad habits you pick up. His remark is of a stupidity level equal to "if you learn French at school, you won't be able to learn German."

As a matter of fact, not only did I once inherit a program that someone had written - well - on a BBC micro that was a pleasure to maintain, I once myself had to write a quick and dirty assembler for an obscure microprocessor in HP Basic, having no other resources available in a crisis. Despite which I have never once had the urge to use labels in C.

It is a poor musician who blames his instrument...

Nothing stopping you from using structure in BASIC but your own mind.

Re:Dijkstra said it best ...

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Professor Edsger Dijkstra

Okay, now all the professional coders whose first programming experience was in BASIC on a VIC-20, Apple II, or TRS-80, raise your hands... man, there seems to be a lot of us, huh.

Oh yeah and "Goto considered harmful" too, of course.

GOTO is essential -- all processors use it at their lowest levels (it goes by the name JMP in assembly language, though.)

All other types of branching or looping are just syntactic sugar.

Ah, the fun I had with QBasic...

This brings me back... the first language I ever learned to code in was C++... but before that, I had learned Qbasic. ;)

I think it was the limited nature of the language which kept me interested in it for so long. Those DOS memory limits were fun... coding a 2D RPG, and trying to stay within around 450KB, so it would run on most people's DOS machines. It was a challenge, I tell you... and trying to keep the code neat, and tidy... also a fun challenge.

To this day, I'm still amazed at some of the things which people were able to do with QBasic, and QuickBasic... fast raycasters, 3d polygon game engines, even voxel engines! ...but I think, the biggest fad was making console style RPGs. I'd like to think that I had a small hand in starting that fad, with a little Qbasic RPG demo I released in 1997. Some of you may have played it, it was called "Lianne in... the Dark Crown". Yes, fun times... fun times indeed.

I think, I'll go looking for all those old Qbasic games. They may not have been much, but they were fun to play.

Using a language vs. knowing what to use it for

yet simple enough that even the school's janitors could use it

Using the language is one thing, knowing what to use it for is another. I know of many many "programmers" who know the programming language's syntax and can write basic programs, but ask them to program something creative or program something creatively and they fail miserably.

My life's language arc

Apple II Basic

Atari Basic

6502 Assembler

Fortran

Action!

Deep Blue C

Pascal

Metrowerks C

GNU C

Perl (just enough to make my Unix life easier)

Java

GNU C++

Visual Basic

RealBasic

Have I come full circle? By the time I got to C++ and VB, I was mainly programming for work, but RB has made programming fun again, and I have launched a couple personal projects for the first time in years.

Gold bonus points if you know what Action! was.

BASIC got me going

Well I'm glad BASIC exists because I probably would not have started programming without it. Can you imagine trying to learn C or something like that when you are 13 (circa 1984) and have no other programmer friends and no internet or BBS to get sample code from. Also C and Pascal compilers cost big money back then. Borland's Turbo Pascal was probably the other big hobby language back the as well. It probably damaged my skills, but I think I have overcome most of the damage.

And Windows 3.1 never would have been as accepted as it was if not for VB 1.0. I think VB was probably the thing that got a lot of people on Windows because programming Windows in C at that point was very complicated for the home hobbiest.

The Janitors Liberation Organization

Hey, stop using janitors as some lowest-common-denominator! Rather "The language was so simple even programmers could use it."

The JLO

REM Thank You For Bad Habits

Ah yes, BASIC. I remember it distinctly as it's what I used for the longest time. Didn't have to declare your variables, had to contend with line numbers (that renum thing came in very handy), and of course the ever-popular GOTO statements.

Eventually I evolved onto qbasic with its functions and subs and (gasp) no line numbers! Then there's VB and VBA. The most fun I've had with those are the shell calls.

On machines that are so locked down that you can't even traverse directories let alone get a shell prompt, you run your form of BASIC, and do basic shells through it or even shell to cmd.exe or command.com -- at one point, I had a really lamed out, simple, featureless, just for fun version of netcat that executed shell commands, piped it to a text file, and had the text file's contents sent through the network. (this with VB's socket stuff). If nothing else, it was a good way to make fake Novell login prompts in the mid 90's. ;-)

In the end, not a lot of people will be taken seriously for knowing BASIC, but since it was the first language I used, I appreciated the retro code.

a BASIC error

10 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
11 PRINT "Happy Birthday to you"
12 PRINT "Happy Birthday dear BASIC"
13 END

Dammit... Missed out a line. Now I remember why I should always increment line numbers by 10.

Re:a BASIC error

how about the 'more structured for no adequate reason' edition?:

10 gosub 60
20 gosub 60
30 print "happy birthday dear BASIC"
40 gosub 60
50 end
60 print "happy birthday to you"
70 return

(tested in MS Office XP VBA, will not work in vb.net as gosub has now gonesub and will not return)

Why BASIC was good

Today's VB and similar derivatives bears so little resemblance to Dartmouth BASIC that it's hardly the same language. If it wasn't for FOR/NEXT and DIM, you might not recognize it at all.

But the old line-oriented BASIC had some advantages in the bad, old days:
1) Interactive editing is difficult to do on a teletype -- many schools only had a hardcopy terminal to a timeshare service. Being able to drop a line in the middle, or retype a single statement really really helped learn what was going on, without having to re-send the entire program. Even with a primitive CRT, full-screen text editors were of poor quality -- dropping in statements helped to debug and fix features.

2) Later, it was ubiquitous: You could write the same abusive repeating naughty-word program at a Radio Shack, an Apple Dealer, or a department store selling Commodore PETs.

3) It beat COBOL or FORTRAN. The only thing with BASICs interactivity might be FORTH -- imagine if we'd been saddled with page-delimited, stack-based code in all our micros. It's a lot harder to learn, but would have helped modularity and library development.

Consumers vs. Creators

"On some level I think it's sad that it went away," he said. "People went from being creators of software to consumers."

I must admit that I share his lament. The programmer-to-user ratio got considerably worse as the ubiquity of computers increased.

When I got my first computer (comment hoping skip the 'geek pissing match'), the majority of other people with computers were using them to write programs. As the PCs (now workstations) got adopted (then coopted) by 'business' for them to do their thing, the computer became a 'tool'. I never stopped programming, but all my non-geek friends started to get in on the computer-owning game. Most of them couldn't write a line of BASIC with a gun to their head, even though they have the capacity to do so, but gosh, they all thought they were just whizz-bang computer users! *sigh*

As a colleague of mine (and a really amazing programmer) once said: "Accessibility is the yellow brick road to mediocrity"

insensitive clods

lay off the janitors!

60 PROFIT!

Syntax Error "PROFIT!"
-------------------^
Command Not Found "PROFIT"

Memories of First Programming

...of typing in BASIC programs on a Teletype with a large roll (yes, just like bathroom towels) of yellow newsprint on a Data General Nova. [ed-thelen.org]

And, to write and read my program - paper tape!

In those days, having a machine do math for you, math that would otherwise be tedious crunching by hand, gave me a sense of wonder and power.

And lo......

And lo, thousands of people suddenly decided to call themselves excellent programmers!

shouldn't that be...

45 IF $ARTICLE="BASIC" GOSUB 60
60 PRINT "COOL! I USED TO PROGRAM ON MY APPLE //e IN APPLE BASIC! I COULD MAKE BAD GRAPHICS AND ASCII ART ALL DAY WITH MY 80 COLUMN EXPANSION CARD!"
70 GOTO 50

CVS

BASIC turns forty...

...yet most of its story got lost in write-errors on unreliable cassette tape recorders attached to thousands of ZX SPECTRUMs.

Forgive me, it must be that brain damage everybody's talking about around here.

And yes, my code sucks. Even in BASIC. And that was 15 years ago.

The old days were better for beginners.

Computers died for me the day the stopped shipping them with built-in BASIC.

Seriously, though. The computers of the 80's were great for learning programming on. Not that BASIC is a good teaching language, but it was accessible and simple.

Modern computers have too many features that you want serious programmers to have access to (complicating languages), and modern languages have all sorts of safety, structure, and OO features that are great for serious programmers but also complicate things for beginners.

Breaking into programming is much harder than it used to be.

Whow...

I didn't know you could insert hyperlinks into BASIC programs... Guess I missed that last update. =P

Put it a different way...

#!/usr/bin/perl
# REM nam37 codes
X10: print "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical ";
X20: print "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness ";
X30: print "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even ";
X40: print "the school's janitors could use it.\n";
X50: end

# (don't ask me why I did this...)

10 PRINT "3-2-1 Contact Got Me Started with BASIC"

I was introduced to BASIC first on a friend's Apple IIe and subsequently on my own first computer, an original Macintosh.

First programs included the standard:

10 print "Enter your name: "
20 input NAME$
30 print NAME$ " is a doofus."
40 goto 30

About that time, I started getting 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, a science and nature periodical written for kids who had grown out of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. In the back of every issue was the "BASIC Training" feature, which had simple games and programs for a variety of platforms. The IBM versions were usually the only ones I could use; Apple IIe and Commodore 64 PEEK and POKE calls were meaningless in Mac MS-BASIC.

But later, BASIC facilitated an (extremely sketchy) introduction to the Macintosh toolbox. MS-BASIC on the mac had built-in pseudo toolbox calls so that you could change fonts, draw graphics primitives and buttons. I ended up writing a grade tracking program that was a snare of interwoven GOTOs and GOSUBs.

I breezed through two years of programming courses in high school and learned C in my own time. Looking back, I'm a little ticked off that my HS didn't offer "real" computer science with Pascal or C or any sort of AP treatment.

Then I learned Perl. Now I do websites. I've forgotten most of BASIC. I have been told this is a good thing. But sometimes (actually, lately, more and more) I have to deal with VBScript and I see "LEFT" and "MID" and I think "what the hell is this crap?"

Ah, memories.

I feel sorry for all the BASIC bashers

A real programmer can extract useful work from anything from a pile of matchboxes [delphiforfun.org] to a state of the art cluster without bitching.

Good enough at the time

Basic wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all computer language. It was a toy language with a very specific purpose in mind, and if everyone remembered it as that, things would be fine. The creators of Basic wrote a book a few years back writing about the design of Basic, and why they made it the way it is. It was meant to be used with a teletype to allow programming while on a computer, allowing quicker debugging and testing than ever before. In order to allow it to be compiled quickly, it had extremely simple syntax. If we just left things at that, there never would have been any controversy.

In defence of BASIC

Yes, BASIC fosters bad programming habits. However, this isn't really the point. Let me explain why.

1. When I and many other people started out with computers, BASIC was the only game in town. Yes, there was assembler and other languages, but its easy to forget these days that information was hard to come by pre-web and indeed, for children who don't have the disposable income for specialist magazine subscriptions. Libraries typically had a couple of computer books, but these would be non-specific description books (that no longer exist as genre really) explaining that a computer had ROM, RAM and you could hook it up to a printer and a VDU! etc. etc. They had hand-drawn "screenshots" of space invaders and pac-man. BASIC was easy enough that we could get started without being put off. On Slashdot its easy to be intellectually macho, but theres a lot to be said for a low learning curve that encouraged you ever onward.

2. BASIC today. Well, its probably not for serious programmers. However, what is often forgotten here is that not everyone who programs is a professional programmer. Or wants to be. For very simple programs, GOTO is no sin. At least when the alternative is no program at all and, say, organising data in a text file by hand or "manually" in Excel or something. Bad habits are not a problem here, because one is never going to go on to have to write mission critical software in C or whatever. I know there are modern scripting languages that are perhaps just as easy to use, but you might be surprised how many people you might have thought have difficulty programming a VCR will break out QBASIC or VB when they need 20 line quicky knocking together and the programmers are "busy until further notice". Its easy to belittle this from a position of knowledge and authority, but relatively speaking these people are your friends in a landscape of PHBs that think programs just happen.

So in conclusion, BASIC is often better than nothing. That might sound like feint praise, but like I say, for the non-specialist that can be quite a valuable thing. Computer programming for the masses. Mock it at your peril.

I'm a janitor!

You insensitive clod!

BASIC? That's too newfangled for me!

11 FORMAT(1X,"I'M SO OLD THAT MY")
12 FORMAT(1X,"FIRST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE")
13 FORMAT(1X,"WAS NOT BASIC")
WRITE(1,11)
WRITE(1,12)
WRITE(1,13)

99 STOP
END

My first BASIC project

I was one of four students in a pilot program in 4th grade (1980) wherein we learned BASIC programming (Apple II) and "New Math" (don't even get me started.)

After learning the basics, I started my first project - a random text generator. I wanted to see if, left to its own devices, the Apple II would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare. Or at least, produce a few dirty words on its own.

I spent two days coding (never having used a keyboard before, typing was arduous)
The program went like this:

10 A=INT(RND(1)*30) +1
20 REM
30 IF A=1 THEN $B="A"
40 IF A=2 THEN $B="B"
...

340 IF A=30 THEN $B="."
350 PRINT $B;
360 GOTO 10

If I recall, there was no "copy" or "paste" function in the boot ROM AppleII BASIC. Typing this was hell on my 9-year-old fingers.
The good news is, the program worked. The bad news is, after I'd finished it, the teacher showed me how to cut 29 lines out of my program using the $CHR() function. I wanted to shoot him.

All in all, BASIC served me well. It's a great intro programming language for pre-teens.

Before we dismiss BASIC as a simple language

That is its biggest strength.

I remember how I got into programming in school - we had these BBC computers [retro-trader.com] which could run BASIC. The language was simple enough for me to understand and intuitive enough for me to actually like programming. (Before that I had seen an aunt learn COBOL and the very look of the language frightened me)

Sure, BASIC is not as advanced as C, BASIC uses GOTO statements, BASIC (not QBASIC though) uses archaic line numbers (but still not as archaic as the Fortran 77 tradition of having to write everything after 7 spaces), but BASIC is the best tool to introduce an enthusiastic person to the world of programming. See this example: In BASIC you would show the person:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 END

Bingo, the person magically sees his first program work. Try the same thing with C:
#include
int main(){
printf("Hello World\n");
return 0;
}

See how much more you have to explain? Ever tried to explain stdio.h and int main to someone? :-) Once you introduce a kid to the concepts of do loops, for loops and if..then statements, it is so much easier to learn a complicated language like C. It's a pity you don't have QBASIC shipping with Windows machines any more. Vbscripting is not at the same intuitive level.

Re:Before we dismiss BASIC as a simple language

Yeah, my uni teaches Java to first years. Java is a nice language (and the uni programmers put together a library to hide most of the exception handling) ... but your first program looks like this:

public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello world!");
}

We were basically taught to type "public static void main string args" as an invocation that we would (hopefully) come to understand more in later weeks...

Office Max, Casio Basic Calc $5

last week, Office Max had a sale on these Casio graphing calculators (usually about $80) for $5. I picked up one, naturally. I should've picked up more. You never know when you'll run into some problem that BASIC could easily solve. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to convert minutes to hours:minutes format with it... for the program I'm working on.

When I vacationed in Canada a few years ago, I took my TI-83 to convert currency and measurements for me. But, I found an even bigger need during the trip... converting CDN$ per litre of "petrol" to USD per gallon of gas. Things made a lot more sense at the pump.

If Not for BASIC...

...the PC revolution would have been a lot less revolutionary, if it happened at all.

The simple, limited, but comprehensible BASIC found in all those Apples, Commodores, Ataris, TI's, etc., showed people that even they could control a computer.

BASIC is about putting ordinary people in charge of their computers, not corporations...or crusading free software elitists whose idea of "ordinary people" are 1982 MIT graduates.

Bringing up BASIC

Here's An interesting article by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, inventors of BASIC [atariarchives.org]

The BASIC of our age

The is the 21st century. The BASIC of our age is PHP.

Many people are making their first ventures into the world of programming by renaming a .html file to .php and carefully inserting their first PHP tag into it. "Hello, world" often is or for many.

Any not just young people - buy webspace, get PHP is the standard now over here, and why not try it, if it is so simple.

Rasmus, Zeev and Andy, they really deserve much good karma for creating the language that made web programming accessible to so many.

Re:ahem

they started it in '63, they didn't finish it till '64. rtfa

Re:ahem

RTFA - 1963 is when they had the idea. it took till May 1, 1964 to finish it.

Re:ahem

10 PRINT "Concived: 1963"
20 PRINT "Born: 1964"
30 END

Re:ahem

10 PRINT "Concived: 1963"
20 PRINT "Born: 1964"
30 END
25 PRINT "Spell checked: Never"
RUN

Re:ahem

That is because array indexes start at 1 instead of zero. So it's really 41 years if you start from year one.