On This Date in 1964, the First BASIC Program

palegray.net notes that on this day in 1964, the first BASIC program was run. From the Wired article:"Mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz had been trying to make computing more accessible to their undergraduate students. One problem was that available computing languages like Fortran and Algol were so complex that you really had to be a professional to use them. BASIC is still alive and well these days, from Microsoft's VB.net to cross-platform variants like REALbasic. For the old-school among us, there's always Joshua Bell's Apple II BASIC emulator implemented in Javascript."

Comments

GOTO 1964

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Wow. I'm the same age.

BBC Basic!

[QJimbo]

I learned BBC Basic on old Acorn Archimedies computers, I always found it very intuitive and consistant in it's structure. A great language.

BBC Basic for Windows is still going too, pretty good product though not really good for anything "serious" in my opinion. But then again, thats Basic for you.

Re:All hail the mighty GOTO!

[hey!]

Well, consider this was 1964, it might have been a computed goto ...

In any case, this was not a language intended for software developers (like Algol). Nor was it a language intended for scientists (like Fortran). It was intended for CS students. Goto is desirable for demonstrating simple models of computation.

Dartmouth Basic had if/then, gosub, and for/next loops, which were much less gawdawful than Fortran's Do loops. It had fewer than a dozen functions, but they were well chosen to give students the ability to do interesting, non-trivial stuff.

I started programming maybe a dozen years after Dartmouth BASIC was introduced, and many of the interpreted language options available were not nearly so clean and well thought out.

Of course, that in part was the downfall of BASIC; it was well enough designed for its purpose that its impact was much larger than its target audience. Extending the language and libraries to such a wide variety of practical uses diluted the virtues of its original design. It was no longer a minimalistic language and runtime environment for students to learn and demonstrate concepts and for academics to do computations in. Its descendants became the patronizing choice when you targeted people who you assumed unable to learn anything better.

Dijkstra's knock wasn't on BASIC _specifically_

[dpbsmith]

In the seventies, all the undergraduates whose computer science courses used PASCAL thought themselves to be very superior beings and looked down their noses at any hobbyist hacking away in BASIC. They would usually parrot a distorted echo of Dijkstra's famous rant, which had perhaps been conveyed to them, accurately or inaccurately, by a teaching assistant, and tell you that it was a scientific fact that BASIC rotted your brain.

So for the record it's worth noting that Dijkstra wasn't ranting against BASIC, specifically. He was ranting against anything that wasn't ALGOL or a derivative thereof, and he was equally harsh about the other major languages of the day:

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

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."