A long long time ago in a place not so far away, there lived a computer with an orange screen, not one of those fancy P-IIs or P-IIIs, not one of those strange SGIs, a simple computer, a computer with a brain so slow that 486s could push it into oblivion, a calm quiet computer without all the paraphernalia associated with computer of late, a computer without a sound card or much of a video card (!!!!!!), a computer without much of a hard disk, a computer with RAM counted in KBs rather than MBs. A beast of the days of yore, the computer served many purposes and ran many programs, and it was the favorite haunt of a panda, a panda who shot at spaceships through a tiny gun turret, and would have continued doing so, had it not been for one of those revelatory moments when the very fabric of existence becomes visible, when existence defines itself, and so it was the day the computer showed off a new set of programs, the day the panda first laid his eyes on BASIC. Never before had the panda seen such power, never before had the panda seen so many strange words, and never before had the panda seen what a program is, and how much fun programming can be.
The first computer language I ever learnt, a language which I used through some of the bestest days of my programming history, the language which I used for everything from my first Hello world program (it actually printed out Subu, and that was back when I was 3 or 4), to my first robot controlling program, turns 40 this year (actually it did back in May, sorry for being late w. Over the years I have come across a lot of people who learnt Basic of old but have over the years shifted loyalties and started hating the beautiful language, and I find that rather strange. Yes I have shifted over to C, I no longer use BASIC for most of my common programming tasks, however I am still fascinated by BASIC code, and I enjoy coding a few of my easiest, and unnecessary programs in BASIC. A lot of people point out that BASIC introduced some of the worst flaws to have plagued programming, GOTO for instance. BASIC is one of the few languages where using GOTO is considered absolutely necessary and far from being treated as a scrounge upon programmers, GOTO is revered. What people forget is that BASIC was originally intended as a mode to simplify computing, they forget that BASIC was never really a functional language (the functional aspects of languages such as Visual Basic came on much later), and the use of GOTOs greatly simplified coding in BASIC. It is true that BASIC was probably the worst language to use for recursion, but well that’s no worse than what a lot of the “academic” functional languages do nowadays, no loops, only recursion is as bad as no recursion, only loops.
During all these intense periods of BASIC bashing, people often forget all that BASIC helped achieve. BASIC originally started out as what can best be described as an academic exercise at Dartmouth College’s CS department. The project culminated in the creation of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and BASIC. BASIC over the years forced people to distribute source code rather than compiled programs, and this simplified program distribution actually enabled a lot of programs to spread around, entire magazines were dedicated to printing BASIC code, people typed out code at home, and though the distribution as a whole was error prone, you did have a lot of programs floating around. One of the first popular C compilers was distributed by DDJ as source code, and well in someways even C owes its popularity to the widespread use of BASIC. Until a few years ago you had most kids starting off programming by learning BASIC, and while we have shifted out of that trend by now, most people my age started off with BASIC (or Logo, but well that’s a different matter).
This week also happens to mark 400 years of the Bard’s first performance at a royal court. Coincidence? I think not.
Ze Panda
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” –Edsgar W. Dijkstra (Computer Scientist)
Yep, GOTO is considered a menace by most programmers, but I find BASIC today still a lot better than C++ because of its simplicity and elegance, not to mention the way QBASIC checks your syntax as you type.
GWBasic on the other hand was notorious with the way it’d handle syntax errors.
One could you please identify yourself, it really helps with the reply. And well Djistrika may have been correct, probably was, but umm most people I have talked to seem to have benifited from their encounters with BASIC, no lasting damage as far as I know.