Was BASIC that horrible or better?

I&#x27;ve programmed extensively in QBasic and TI-BASIC. Both were extremely limiting, ofc.<p>But there is one thing I&#x27;m very grateful for, in retrospect. Both languages required very few &quot;concepts&quot;. Functions? Pointers? Classes? These are basics for coders, but BASIC didn&#x27;t ask even this of you.<p>With a small syntactic baseline you could make full on games pretty easily. Compare this to making games even with Python using PyGame, or Godot, or whathaveyou.<p>Of course, nothing prevents you from learning Python and just limiting yourself to a few data types and control structures. But what really made BASICs easy (for me) was that &quot;draw to the screen&quot; was such a primitive operation. Same with detecting keypresses.<p>Again, these are easy if you&#x27;re a software engineer, or even if you know how to code. But what if you don&#x27;t?<p>Even Visual Basic had this virtue. When I was in Mexico I volunteered at a homeless shelter. The man who operated the shelter had no coding education, but was able to self teach Visual Basic two decades ago, and had created an entire system for managing the facility.<p>He had tried to rewrite it to use a more modern language (I believe C# or VB.Net) and was totally unable.<p>I&#x27;ve never used VB but I&#x27;ve heard countless tales like this, where non-coders create entire functioning software in it.

BASIC was responsible for sparking the interest in computers for a generation. One of the most harmful falsehoods about it is that somehow GOTOs and line numbers would turn you into a bad programmer for life. I think that even today there is nothing like BASIC to get kids interested in computers.<p>But it&#x27;s not a language just for kids. While most dialects are somewhat limiting, there is nonetheless a TON of real useful stuff you can do with it.

There were many kinds of BASIC created over the years. Some were incredibly limited interpreters for computers with 1kB available working memory, and decades later others were full-fledged desktop languages with structured programming and objects and GUI event loops.<p>Is TypeScript in 2023 the same language as JavaScript in 1996? The various BASICs were even more different than that. It’s impossible to say that they were all categorically horrible or perfect. But they did enable millions of people to discover computing, on everything from ZX-81 to Windows 95.

The biggest achievement of BASIC was probably that it was <i>the</i> gateway drug into computing for teenagers throughout the 80&#x27;s, because every popular home computer came with a BASIC builtin, available right after switching the computer on.

BASIC was ideal for introducing a generation of school kids to programming.<p>Back in the 80’s you fired up your computer and you had a readily-available interpreter for which you could immediately do ‘real’ stuff like printing characters anywhere on the screen and turning on and off pixels (even in colour on some platforms).<p>There was no need to compile or build a project or start with a lot of boilerplate. You just did stuff right away from a REPL or could make programs from line numbers and save them.<p>I learned a ton from it. Eg how to think algorithmically and break up something complicated into small parts. A key milestone was grokking the difference between GOTO and GOSUB. I also understood much about its limitations once I started learning Turbo Pascal in high school.<p>If you’re judging BASIC compared to a modern IDE with a modern structured language of course it falls short, but for what it was at the time it was nearly perfect.

The article&#x27;s example of a Fortran program is an anachronism. In 1975, what we had was Fortran IV which didn&#x27;t have any of the structuring stuff shown in the example. This example of Fortran IV shows where most of BASIC came from although there are important features of Fortran that it doesn&#x27;t show (DO loops, multi-character variable names, SUBROUTINES, FUNCTIONS, COMMON blocks), but Basic was pretty clearly designed as an interactive, student dialect of Fortran.<p><pre><code> C AREA OF A TRIANGLE - HERON&#x27;S FORMULA C INPUT - CARD READER UNIT 5, INTEGER INPUT, ONE BLANK CARD FOR END-OF-DATA C OUTPUT - LINE PRINTER UNIT 6, REAL OUTPUT C INPUT ERROR DISPAY ERROR MESSAGE ON OUTPUT 501 FORMAT(3I5) 601 FORMAT(4H A= ,I5,5H B= ,I5,5H C= ,I5,8H AREA= ,F10.2, $13H SQUARE UNITS) 602 FORMAT(10HNORMAL END) 603 FORMAT(23HINPUT ERROR, ZERO VALUE) INTEGER A,B,C 10 READ(5,501) A,B,C IF(A.EQ.0 .AND. B.EQ.0 .AND. C.EQ.0) GO TO 50 IF(A.EQ.0 .OR. B.EQ.0 .OR. C.EQ.0) GO TO 90 S = (A + B + C) &#x2F; 2.0 AREA = SQRT( S * (S - A) * (S - B) * (S - C) ) WRITE(6,601) A,B,C,AREA GO TO 10 50 WRITE(6,602) STOP 90 WRITE(6,603) STOP END</code></pre>

Author here. I thought my wordpress stats are broken, when instead of the usual 3-10 vitits it showed 3800 :&#x27;). Thank you.<p>A personal background: writing this article was fun! I started with BASIC too, I was about 6, and the Amstrad CPC6128 my dad had was 8 already. You can tell by how I treat Locomotive BASIC like a reference implementation of the 80s. I knew Pascal only from a label on diskette 5 (but someone replaced it with invoices), listings from 80s Bajtek magazine stash that I mostly got from a friend (he had an Atari 65XE but was switching to a... Pentium III 500Mhz), and the manual for the Amstrad and having A LOT of free time were my source of knowledge. I remember trying to replicate (in BASIC!) the UI of first computerized cash registers from the shops, when I was 12.<p>I knew Dijkstra made the quote, but never before asked myself: when did he do it? Was it the BASIC I know? What did people use, probably just assembly, right? Wrong!<p>It&#x27;s amazing how much old documents, newsletters, and documentation you can find from the 70s, and how many the problems it did not change that much today, even though the computers changed incredibly.<p>I&#x27;ll read through the comments here, and for sure won&#x27;t miss any on the site itself.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about this recently when teaching my daughter to program.<p>What was very different about BASIC compared to today was that it was <i>&quot;Beginners&#x27; All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code&quot;</i> (that&#x27;s what BASIC stands for). At the same time it used to be used by adults to solve real world problems.<p>If you outgrew BASIC you could easily segue into Pascal which was much more powerful but still designed with education in mind.<p>I think today the gap between what is used to <i>teach</i> and what is used to <i>solve problems</i> is much bigger. Once children get older the motivation for toy languages understandably goes away but learning a modern programming language that is actually used in the industry is a big step that is not easy to overcome.<p>I have no perfect solution for that but for us and for now we settled for Godot and GD Script. It is simple enough to get started and I think when I showed my daughter the Tesla App [1] it was a big motivation.<p>[1] I&#x27;ve heard the current version it is not made in Godot anymore, but it was when we started on this journey a while ago.

On the Commodore PET, at least, you could do all kinds of clever things with BASIC due to the special graphics characters and the &quot;cursor control&quot; characters that could be embedded in strings (up&#x2F;down&#x2F;left&#x2F;right etc). One of my hacks was a playable, graphic video game in <i>one</i> line of code (almost the full maximum 80 characters) and another is the standard 1-liner that generates mazes.<p>For examples of fancy BASIC graphic programs, search for:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=cursor+tape+magazine" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=cursor+tape+mag...</a><p>Cursor magazine programs did occasionally have an assembly language subroutine; at least one flashed the screen using one. But most of them were just BASIC.<p>Purists may scoff, but kids with zero experience could make animated graphics after just a day or two of playing around, and curiosity about how more sophisticated programs worked (in my case: The &quot;Miser&quot; text adventure game) would soon motivate to find out more. Is that bad? It was the whole point of the language, the B stands for &quot;Beginner&quot;. Plenty of time to graduate to other things later (in my case: Assembly language -&gt; Pascal -&gt; C).

I’m so happy that this article mentions Bajtek.<p>It was one of the most important, if not _the_ most important, source of computing knowledge in my early childhood. I was born in 1984, got my first computer – a C64C – in 1991, and my dad procured a heap of past issues of „Bajtek” from previous years. In rural Poland those days, knowledge was hard to come by, so those proved invaluable to me.<p>Not only were there type-in programs and games, like in the German 64er, but most of them were actually accompanied by prose articles that offered clear explanations, background, and trivia. I learned BASIC from Bajtek and a few books. Bajtek literally had a monthly column called „For Preschoolers Only” with a BASIC tutorial in it.

One often overlooked aspect of BASIC&#x27;s and COMAL&#x27;s success was the educational benefit of line numbers.<p>Several teachers who taught BASIC&#x2F;COMAL in the 1970ies and 1980ies have commented to me, that the line numbers made them much easier to teach than for instance PASCAL.<p>The line numbers enables the teacher to say &quot;Now, look at line 240&quot; which is much more precise and concise than &quot;Look at the statement in the IF inside the WHILE&quot; etc.

Trying to solve the modern problems and showing that one needs more code than in Python is not the point.<p>The reason Basic wasn&#x27;t horrible but amazing at the time as the home computers appeared is hard to understand without the context of that time:<p>Basic on these computers was, in today&#x27;s language:<p>- an actual &quot;complete&quot; operating system and<p>- a command language and<p>- a script language and<p>- a programming language<p>Additionally, if one wanted to use the &quot;full power&quot; of the CPU one had to use machine code, as there was so little RAM that most of the programs that did fascinating stuff were true masterpieces. Those using Basic knew that it&#x27;s not &quot;all there is&quot;.

BASIC was almost my first programming language. Ten years before anybody had a home computer (1967), I decided that I would write a program. I was just a kid and I came across a keypunch machine in a small room at my high school. After reading a book on FORTRAN I keypunched a program that was supposed to solve optimization problems over sets of linear equations in a number of unknowns constrained by a set of inequalities. The algorithm for doing this is known as the Simplex Method.<p>I gave the deck of cards to a friend and a couple of days later I got the fan-fold paper output that listed a bunch of syntax errors and nothing else. I just didn&#x27;t understand programming very well.<p>BASIC is what got me on track. I found a book in my local public library on the relatively new language BASIC. It was easy to understand and I practiced writing out the solutions to simple problems with paper and pencil. I didn&#x27;t have access to a BASIC system, but I learned enough that I could try FORTRAN again (this time on simpler problems). After a few attempts (with the two day turnaround) I was successful and programming became a hobby that eventually led to a career as a real computer scientist.<p>BASIC was just right. It was concrete enough for a novice to understand while being much more expressive than assembly language. I&#x27;ve never actually run any program that I wrote in BASIC, but I have written programs in scores of languages since and BASIC got me started.<p>Today, there are better choices for a first language: Python provides students with a lot of power right away, and my daughter learned Scheme as her first language and never had difficulties in later classes with recursion or functions as values.

I found that article to be great. The author does a good job of trying to understand what was going on in the 70&#x27;s with programming languages. I have a small issue with their use of &quot;Fortran 70&quot; rather than Fortran IV (or Fortran 4 as it was called) which was far and away more used, especially in university&#x2F;scientific contexts.<p>As I&#x27;ve told unbelieving students that I learned to program using a Teletype and line numbers were really really useful. Later I actually used an &quot;editor&quot; on a DEC Writer and it was even more convoluted. (it would print the line you were editing, down arrow would move to the next line, up arrow to the previous line, right arrow would print out the current line character by character and if you typed other characters they would either be inserted or replace characters depending on the mode.)<p>I think a case insensitive python with group delimiters rather than using indentation for groups and a line terminator character would be a good replacement. The goal is to minimize the number of new things you have to learn to get going. Concepts like grouping and individual statements seem to &quot;stick&quot; better with students when they can easily express that with characters in the code. (my experience teaching people to program YMMV of course).

I spent the summer of &#x27;83 at the GE Wilmington, NC nuclear fuels plant as the sole user of an HP 9845C with the integrated full size plotter. My job as a GA Tech ChE co-op student was to go around the plant with a rather simple gradient air sampling unit mapping out the airborne density of the various sizes of UO₂. I would take my overnight measurements (point a geiger counter at the different filter papers from the different levels) and enter the data into a program I wrote in... HP Basic. I would then feed that into another program I wrote in... HP Basic that plotted the densities as level plots in HPGL across a rather detailed for the time 2D map of the plant. It produced multicolor paper plots on full size drafting paper. My bosses, the physicists in the safety department, were very pleased. I was so happy doing this that I spent the evenings in the UNC Wilmington library learning level plotting algorithms. I needed more programming time so I would come in very early in the morning and have to remember to clock in at 8AM (overtime not allowed). All of us co-ops made $10&#x2F;hr in &#x27;83, and I saved enough to pay for the entire next quarter at Ga Tech every quarter I spent working.<p>Weekends I spent at the beach, though.<p>I see from Wikipedia that the system costs were enormous! But that was an exquisite summer romance with BASIC.<p>Not too many years later I discovered Turbo Pascal. Yeah, off to the races. And then came Turbo C++, and g++ around &#x27;92. Haha you kids today would really enjoy debugging templates in early g++. (The idea that you could write the same code for &#x27;float&#x27; and &#x27;double&#x27; was intoxicatingly cool.)<p>The transition from Fortran (what I learned to program with) =&gt; HP Basic =&gt; Pascal =&gt; C++ was pretty easy. Pointers, well if you study &#x27;The C Programming Language&#x27; carefully, are not difficult. People writing serious computational mathematics codes are constantly using pointers, just not as &#x27;pointers&#x27;. Debugging, well that is another problem entirely, and I believe from way out here in the future, that that is the most difficult problem of all. How to program in such a way that the bugs are not silent. Those silent ones were the cause of most of the grief in my programming life.<p>The thing about HP Basic is none of the bugs were ever silent. Same with Turbo Pascal. I did a lot of really cool things with those &#x27;toy&#x27; languages. They never caused me any grief.<p>So I think Dijkstra didn&#x27;t understand (maybe) the importance of painless pleasure when (some) mortals are learning programming. It sure turned me on.

As a child a learnt BASIC after having taught LOGO. As a child that was an advancement (with all due respect to LOGO). Almost every computer included BASIC so it was an universal programming language for home computers. You could also interact with assembler (CALL&#x2F;SYS instructions) so it enabled to go even farther. Conclusion, BASIC was pervasive and it was not horrible since your focus was in creating something on cheap personal computers. I know two older people than me, accountants, that learnt BASIC around their 40s and build their own accounting programs in a ZX81 [2] and TI-99&#x2F;4A [3]. I don&#x27;t think many people now of that age (plus &quot;age inflation&quot;) learn this new skill (programming) and create an useful program or even a script for themselves.<p>The language is primitive by today&#x27;s standards but it gives you all sort of ways to express yourself. When BASIC progressed and was more structured, for example AmigaBASIC from Microsoft [2], there were more alternatives and more evolution so it is natural that BASIC faded.<p>Also important to highlight that every popular computer magazine (media) published BASIC code, also books.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX81" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX81</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AmigaBASIC" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AmigaBASIC</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TI-99&#x2F;4A" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;TI-99&#x2F;4A</a>

It&#x27;s a great language if you want to write a compiler for fun: You can add the different statements incrementally, so you quickly get to a point where you can compile your first program and then add more and more features to compile more and more.<p>Also, when I was implementing FOR, my first naive implementation was compiling the body first, then append the loop related things that check the conditional and jump backwards to the start of the body. &quot;Hang on, what about the case when the condition is initially false?&quot; I thought, only to discover that the BASIC standard actually specifies that a FOR loop runs at least once, even if the condition is false! Officially, the language is advertised as for beginners, but to me it looks like it was meant as a lingua franca of computers, as in not only easy to understand, but also easy to implement.<p>Here&#x27;s a BASIC compiler for the HP 15-C calculator written in Idris: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;michaelzinn&#x2F;voyc&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;Compile&#x2F;CommodoreBasicCompiler.idr?ref_type=heads#L337" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;michaelzinn&#x2F;voyc&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;Compil...</a>

The only basic variant I used was qbasic, it was the first programming language I used!<p>It&#x27;s not horrible at all if a child can learn to make a game in it from scratch.<p>However, qbasic doesn&#x27;t have the line numbers (edit: at least not mandatory!). Never used a basic variant that requires the line numbers, but that seems like a total kludge!

I still remember the appeal of BASIC to me as a kid. A simple GOTO loop over INKEY, in which you can test which key is pressed and erase+redraw a CIRCLE accordingly. A trivial thing, but the feel it created was unforgettable.<p>Idk what Dijkstra means. My whole generation started with BASIC and learned languages as they’ve become useful enough for every new wave of accessible hardware, which wasn’t cheap for a hobby. There was no like “oh, now you’re lost”. My next language was 8080 assembly then Pascal then 8086 then C. You just can’t learn Pascal and C on a Sinclair clone when loading a compiler from a tape recorder takes half an hour and most of the available memory. And you can’t learn Python either, because it doesn’t really exist yet. I know it’s from 1991, but never heard of it until ten+ years later.<p>I also know that some ROMs had FORTRAN instead. Maybe Dijkstra would like to re-teach FORTRAN programmers more.

The question is: what is BASIC? Just to take two examples, Atari BASIC and Atari Turbo-BASIC XL. They share some keywords but on the other side are totally different languages, for instance Turbo BASIC has structured programming constructs like procedures.<p>Part of the problem is that the OS API is kind of restricted to basic sounds and graphics drawing primitives. For everything else you need PEEK and POKE.

I learned BASIC at age 7 and then shortly thereafter tried to learn C and failed because I couldn&#x27;t seem to grasp pointers. Then I took a detour to x86 assembly language and then pointers just became obvious.<p>The beauty of BASIC is that everything is so concrete. Every line has a number, and you just keep going down the page unless you hit a GOTO. It&#x27;s easy to reason about what&#x27;s going on inside the computer. Abstractions make a language powerful, but also harder to learn. This is why spreadsheets are still the most popular way of programming a computer -- they&#x27;re concrete and you can see exactly what is happening in every cell.

Basic was my second programming language after Logo[1] in the early 90s (I was in 5th grade) in a third world country, on very slow computers that a factory had donated to my school after they had passed their useful life for the factory. In such an environment basic was amazing. Low barrier of entry both from computing and knowledge perspective. Easy to learn and create a lifetime of love and passion for programming and all things computers in people like me.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Logo_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Logo_(programming_language)</a>

What is a good program? To me, it&#x27;s a program that does something useful and serves a purpose (being this a person or an organization).<p>I&#x27;m tired of this &quot;good programming&quot;, there is people that talks about good programming and than produced programs that are either too complex to do something useful. These to me are bad programs!<p>There were a ton of companies or persons that used (and still use) BASIC (or Visual Basic) programs to do stuff, and maybe if it wasn&#x27;t for BASIC these programs would probably never be written.<p>Same thing we can say about COBOL, a ton of companies are run by an IBM AS&#x2F;400 running old COBOL programs written in the 80s that still work fine.

Punched cards were a thing of the past when I first encountered computers (in the form of ROM BASIC machines like the TRS80 and PET4032), but there&#x27;s just something fascinating about being able to physically hold the individual lines of your program in your hand.<p>These days if you want to run a program to crunch some numbers, the program is one file, and the data another - but back then, since you fed the whole &#x27;job&#x27; into the card reader at once, you could change the data set by just swapping out the cards.<p>Not saying that this was in any way better. Just that the idea of it feels so alien - and this was the era in which BASIC first evolved.

I learned programming in BASIC. One nice thing about BASIC is that it allowed for a mechanistic model of what the computer was doing at each line. Being able to work through a program on paper was especially useful when lack of access to a physical computer for more than a few minutes a day discouraged trial-and-error programming.<p>I think the idea of learning one bad thing and being ruined for life is a misconception about learning.

BASIC was the thing that allowed non-programmers to easily start out. It was the whole reason home computers initially took off - they all ran BASIC, source code was mostly compatible across systems (as long as you didn&#x27;t use special features unique to your computer) and anybody could learn it in a day. It&#x27;s never been replaced or improved upon. You could argue Python is the modern BASIC but it&#x27;s much more complicated and far slower, bit banging the hardware is also not something easily experimented with in Python whereas with BASIC it was the next step beyond learning the keywords on your machine.<p>The GOTO guy has done more damage to computing than Microsoft and Google combined.

I don&#x27;t think there was a better language for 8 bit micros.<p>It was line oriented so you didn&#x27;t need an editor. It was simple and had a very short learning curve.<p>You were never going to write a huge program, so modules or packages weren&#x27;t a necessity.<p>It just fit this niche perfectly.

Of course Dijkstra didn&#x27;t like BASIC. BASIC was the language that shook programming loose from his ivory tower and let common people try it. On actual computers. Bought at stores like Sears.

BASIC was so horrible that it was obvious to me, even as a complete neophyte, that it sucked. I quickly gained the understanding that BASIC itself is a computer program written in machine language, which offers a dumbed-down way of using the computer. When I saw what assembly language is like, I immediately realized that, look, even though this is a difficult language in which you specify minute details, ... even in such a language you don&#x27;t have to put a stupid line number on every line!

BASIC opened the door to computing for a great many people. It usually gets bashed by (a) academics or (b) CS students who have not yet had any productive, real-world, development experience. I know many folks who started with BASIC and went on to become excellent programmers&#x2F;developers.<p>At the end of the day, what matters is the end-product. Your users don’t care what programming language or tech you used to solve their problem.

GFA Basic on the Atari ST was my true entry into programming, and I went through many other languages before I found one that felt as modern and productive.

It&#x27;s been a long time since I programmed in BASIC, but I have gone memories of it.<p>My very first computer was a Commodore Vic20, whose User&#x27;s Manual was essentially a BASIC manual. One of the very first programs I learned to wrote drew a simple bird on the screen made by characters and made its wings flap. I was mesmerised.<p>Boy, how much I enjoyed that manual!<p>Edit: bids -&gt; bird

Any BASIC which lacks user-defined named subroutines (i.e. real functions, not DEF FN) is a terrible language (compared to available alternatives), especially for beginners:<p>&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35220605">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35220605</a>&gt;<p>I wrote BASIC code in the 1980s; both games and utility software. It is <i>precisely because</i> I did those things that I object to any BASIC lacking functions. The BASIC I used lacked functions, and I remember it being <i>very difficult</i> to do what I can now call abstractions and subroutines. This would have been vastly more easy if the BASIC I used had had user-defined proper functions.

We miss having environments like BASIC nowadays, Python is probably the closest to it, but at least by the 16 and 32 bit days of home computers, BASIC not only was structured, native compilation was part of the picture against.<p>Guess we need to hope for Mojo&#x27;s success.

My first exposure to programmming was by coding in TI-BASIC on my TI calculator during math class in highschool. I never thought of going online to learn more so I had to explore what every builtin functions did. Them being written in a foreign language also did not help. Discovering &quot;Then&quot; and being able to make a multi-line &quot;If&quot; block was a revelation. I didn&#x27;t know a single developer back then. I think I still have that silly device somewhere to which I owe so much.

People forget that these languages grew up alongside the computer they ran on.<p>BASIC is a product of <i>limited memory</i>. It can run, as an interpreter, in a machine with 4K of RAM and <i>nothing else</i>. No ROM--No tape--No disk.<p>Try that in <i>any</i> other language. The only ones that can even attempt that are Scheme and Forth.<p>Dijkstra can slag BASIC all he wants; he had access to computers with megabytes of storage. We plebians, on the other hand, were quite lucky if we had 4K of RAM.

I&#x27;m about to start writing some basic on my 2023 ZX Spectrum Next <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX_Spectrum_Next" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX_Spectrum_Next</a><p>It was my first language - I don&#x27;t think it was detrimental as it lead to me having my career in tech.

&quot;Otherwise the examples mention 122 characters per line.&quot; I&#x27;m pretty sure that should be 132 not 122.

Why would I hate the first programming language I learned?<p>What I hate is the number of tools since created to enable endless tech debt and horrible engineering practices so as to increase the hiring pool of fungible coding talent.<p>Who needed nice things anyway when we have 280 characters and inspiring influencers?

GOTO has its uses here and there, even in C&#x2F;C++. It&#x27;s just sometimes simpler than enabling exceptions or overthinking the indentation to annihilate the readability of code. But it&#x27;s a horrible generic control structure and that&#x27;s all anyone notices.

BASIC itself can&#x27;t be defined -- which basic? Altair 4K, Apple ][+, Microsoft QuickBasic? Some BASICs are quite advanced, others not so much. Honestly, later versions of QuickBasic were worlds ahead of what I did on the Apple.

Dijkstra was a dick and his take has probably be more damaging than BASIC itself.

Pascal (the reference PL) is sooo clumsy and verbose that I just can&#x27;t take Dijkstra&#x27;s opinion at its face value.<p>Maybe early BASICs were so-so, but QBasic already had all kind if procedural stuff.

BASIC was easy and I was able to modify some Apple Basic games and learn some techniques from their code, but using PEEK and POKE was such a mistery!

At least QBasic was great. No line numbers and came with a very good ducumentation. This was very important before internet was in every home.

I think a good supplemental way to extend on BASIC knowledge is a good stack-based language, something forth-like, perhaps.

It was okay. Just don&#x27;t use it to build large systems. It is known to create an unmaintainable mess.

BASIC is what got me into programming, so there is that.

Is there anything as <i>visual</i> as visual basic?

BASIC was a product of its time.