A couple of quotes that I’ve enjoyed from this long form article celebrating BASIC. Other times.
First time I hear about http://www.quitebasic.com/ too. Look to the source, find the the relevant javascript source and you find a practical tokenizer and simple BASIC interpreter. Very cool!
When it comes to technology, I don’t feel like a grumpy old man. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. But I don’t mind saying this: The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC.
Today, Kurtz is blunt about criticism of the language he co-created as being insufficiently serious or a dangerous way to begin learning about computer programming. “It’s B.S.,” he says. “I’ll go out on a limb and suggest the degrading of BASIC by the professionals was just a little bit of jealousy–after all, it took years for us to develop our skill; how is it that complete idiots can write programs with just a few hours of skill?”
Famously, they wrote the first draft of Altair BASIC without having access to an Altair, using a simulator they ran on a Digital Equipment PDP-10 minicomputer. “Monte Davidoff, who helped me and Bill write BASIC for the Altair, once said programming was like writing a novel,” Allen says. “That’s how we approached BASIC. We started with a plot of sorts to know the general approach we were taking. We broke the big ideas into sections, or chapters, and then we’d edit and re-edit and keep editing until we had preserved the big picture and fixed all the bugs. It was the hardest but most enjoyable work I’ve ever done.”
These computers begged to be programmed in a way that their descendants do not.
🔗 A celebration of one of technology’s biggest, most underappreciated revolutions – published on TIME on