If not for the BASIC examples in the old 3-2-1 contact kids magazines that I discovered worked on my elementary schools Apple II computers and then later QBASIC, I have no idea what I would be doing in life.
That was my gateway to a greater interest in computers and an eventual job in IT. And. I will always respect BASIC for it.
This is my childhood! That and Logo Writer were the gateway to my future.
I worked with a buddy; one of us would read from the code listing in the magazine and the other would type. We didn’t know the names of some of the symbols so we made up our own names. Tilde will always be the ‘squiggly’ to me.
I agree with the author that oddly Basic syntax is closer to Assembly than most languages so is an ok place to start.
I’d like to see Dijkstra write an Assembly program without JMP.
This is where I’d humorously link that maniac who wrote a program exclusively using MOV, of any amount of quotation or clarification could convince a modern search engine that “movulator” does not, in fact, mean “modulator.”
Searching for “MOVfuscator” results in this: https://github.com/Battelle/movfuscator
Learned how to render graphics the hard way in Apple BASIC back in grade school. Was fun.
My kids have been surprisingly interested when I show them Commodore 64 or BBC Micro BASIC. I was expecting them to groan but they wanted to write their own programs on them. They’re also more interested when it’s a physical machine than an emulator.
I think it’s a bad idea to start with BASIC in this day and age. However, I do think it’s a very good idea to teach student BASIC once they’ve learned a modern language. It’s a great way to teach them why programming works the way it does and to teach about the roots.
