Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 9:46 pm
Posts: 8503
Location: Midwestern USA
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Despite “professional” programmers looking down their noses at BASIC, the language did a lot to get people interested in a programming career. So, Dr. Kurtz can be justly considered a pioneer in the development of computing for the masses. He was 96 when he passed away, a life well-lived.
I was fairly late to learning BASIC—I knew no high-level languages for about the first eight years of my computing career. My first project in 1970 was machine code—literally; there was no assembler. My second major project was also machine code, but at least I had an assembler at my disposal. I wasn’t exposed to BASIC until 1979, when I got involved with something on an MAI Basic 4 minicomputer. Once I got a Commodore 64, I decided to become more adept with the language, although it really was too slow on that machine to do anything serious with it.
Reading some of the comments posted on Hackaday about this, I see someone asserted that there was no good reason for BASIC to be successful and that it should have been Forth. That gave me a good chuckle, as Forth’s learning curve is a lot steeper than that of BASIC. Most people have a rough go with RPN and the concept of messing with a data stack. On the other hand, BASIC’s infix notation is easy to relate to the way we learned math in high school. Having automatic variables makes it easier for the programmer to focus on the task and less on having to wrestle with the machine and how/where it’s storing its data. I suspect that had Dr. Kurtz and John Kemeny said...
Quote: "Let’s introduce this language that looks like random gibberish, requires the programmer to be cognizant at all times of a stack, and goes completely opposite of what our students have learned about math and grammar. We’ll call it BASIC, ’cuz it’s for beginners who want to be thoroughly turned off by anything having to do with a computer.”
...BASIC would have died a quick and painless death.
Fun fact about Dr. Kemeny: he worked on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos along side John von Neumann, and was Einstein’s mathematical assistant at one point.
I also noted comments about BASIC’s unstructured nature and how developing a major project with BASIC would be hellish. That would be true of microcomputer BASIC dialects, especially Micro-Soft’s interpreter, but not so the timesharing BASIC interpreters that proliferated on minicomputers of the 1970s and 1980s. Those interpreters were designed to support major business development, and are several orders of magnitude more powerful than what Gates and Allen were peddling.
Several such timesharing interpreters survive to this day, two of which, BBX and Thoroughbred Dictionary-IV, are familiar to me (I have Thoroughbred installed on one of my Linux boxes). I have written major-sized vertical applications in Thoroughbred BASIC, one of which was a full ERP-style package used by a building materials distributor that they ran on for about 25 years. Yes, it required quite a bit of planning and sit-down discussion with the business’ managers, as well as close to a year of programming and testing time, to bring it to fruition, but at no time were there any aspects to the language that got in the way of development.
Incidentally, Thoroughbred BASIC and BBX both support branch and subroutine labels, C-like structures, recursive programming, remote subroutines, reusable code, background processing, and several types of keyed random-access files, including ISAM. Hardly a beginner’s language and hardly unstructured, I’d say. 
Thank you, Dr. Kurtz, for opening the fascinating world of computer programming to so many people.
_________________ x86? We ain't got no x86. We don't NEED no stinking x86!
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