I love occasionally explaining repeating tasks in pseudo #basic. E.g.
do x.
do y
GOTO 1
No-one learns basic anymore. Most folks can follow what i've said but they don't actually know why i said GOTO. and they don't know why that really would have been written 10, 20, 30 instead of 1, 2, 3.
Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.
I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.
I am a #computer. My company is known more for video games. My American counterpart was only for video games, but I got a special floppy disk system and could run #BASIC programs from a keyboard and could even do financial services through my modem. What am I?
When I say #BASIC, I mean anything from Dartmouth up to and including Q/uickBASIC. I do not consider VisualBasic, VB.net, etc, to be BASIC any more than I consider Javascript to be Java. Newer ones in the same spirit - FreeBASIC and qb64, do count, however.
This is my personal opinion and I'm sure many draw the line somewhere else, but when I use that word, it's somewhere in that range (including Atari, Commodore, CP/M, Altair, etc flavors). #programming
59 years ago today, the first computer program written in #BASIC was run.
The easy-to-learn and -use #programming language revolutionized #computing. A decade later, #BillGates would co-found #Microsoft to develop and sell the BASIC interpreter for the #Altair 8800, the first commercially successful desktop microcomputer.
Hi, I'm Andy. I started my technology journey with a ZX Spectrum 48K. I learned #BASIC. Later I moved up to the Spectrum 128K +2. A few years before starting college, I taught myself #VisualBasic 5 in the bath (I didn't have a PC, just a book). My first computer was a Cyrix 686. At college I learned #HTML (not CSS that wasn't really a thing). Since then I have taught myself #PHP and #Javascript and I have a million courses on Udemy to learn other stuff.
Leider wusste ich in den 90ern nicht, dass #basic bei DOS dabei war - ich hatte nur die „Shell“-Programmierung mit GOTO und IF ERRORLEVEL gefunden und bin damit schnell an Grenzen gestoßen
In the early 80s, both Radio-Quebec (now TeleQuebec) which I watched on UHF channel 17 (Montreal broadcast) and TVOntario (both similar to PBS in the USA) would produce educational programs to teach people how to use and program computers.
The radio-quebec program had even homework you had to send through mail. The TVOntario show had really intricate animation to explain concepts. For example, a pulse wave generation (and a #Commodore PET). #retrocomputing#ti#apple#Atari#basic
A small update to the alternative #PC operating systems list beside #Linux and #BSD - If you want to try something #new and use either way and only #basic functions & programs on your #desktop, you might want to try these:
So for tonight I decide to rewrite the leibniz algorithm from #python to #BASIC - in particular #Commodore64 - we had been talking about #Retro earlier...
Cut iterations to 1000 and blew the dust off my brain.
While I'm not personally particularly interested in old computers (beyond PDPs & LMs), I'm extremely interested in people designing their own 8/16bit computers, and the exploration of #8bit / #16bit computing as a living medium, rather than as relics of primarily nostalgic value.
A friend of mine is looking for a reimplementation of Sinclair ZX Spectrum BASIC for modern operating systems.
I mean an implementation of the ZX BASIC language with close source compatibility with legacy programs, designed to run BASIC on and leverage the environment of Windows or Linux. Not a Spectrum emulator, a cross compiler, or an alternate BASIC dialect.