BASIC - the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing
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https://www.wired.com/story/back-to-basic-the-most-consequential-programming-language/
I WAS ENTERING the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he’d handwritten a program.
I plunked it out on the PET’s chunky mechanical keyboard.
10 PRINT "CLIVE"
20 GOTO 10I typed “RUN,” hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.
For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.
I also realized, studying that tiny two-line program, that it was an infinite loop. The computer would run the code until the sun burned out, or someone unplugged it. There are not many ways, when you’re a preteen, to grasp the fabric of infinity. But I’d just done so, thanks to this strangely accessible computer language: BASIC.
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Literally me
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
-Cormac McCarthy -
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@jon-nyc said in BASIC - the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing:
Literally me
I did the same thing when I was supposed to be learning Fortran 77 on a university mainframe, hence using up my extremely meager allotment of usage credits at a stroke.
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@Axtremus said in BASIC - the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing:
My favorite BASIC feature is GOTO.
COBOL has it. Use it at peril of your employment.
It’s actually not that bad, but it encourages lazy coding. You should never use it to do anything but go to a paragraph exit. I’ve used ON GOTO to control focus on different form fields and it worked well.
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In 1989, my uncle saw I was the only kid in the generation that stood a chance to get ahead, so passed on a gift that he was given as the President of his Union. It was a little pocket computer. Nothing serious by today’s standards, but it could run basic and had some memory to it. It basically looked like a scientific calculator with an alphabet keyboard as well. The most sophisticated thing that it ever did was record all of the formulas that I thought I would need for my physics final. The weird thing? The repetition that was necessary to enter those formulas along with the huge pain in the ass that was necessary to access them kinda made me memorize them and I never used it except as a calculator, which was allowed.
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@jon-nyc said in BASIC - the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing:
Literally me
Us too, except the commands we had this n00b put in in Basic caused the printer to endlessly advance the printer paper a page. Luckily, he did not rat us out.
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When I say literally me it includes the age reference. I turned 12 in 1980, in September when the school year started.
@jon-nyc said in BASIC - the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing:
When I say literally me it includes the age reference. I turned 12 in 1980, in September when the school year started.
Man, you’re old.
