Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born ...

If Basic had a domain, it was as a starter language, and there are many candidates to replace it, Fisher says. “The best ‘first language’ is a hot topic of debate,” she says.

The only full-blown BASIC program I’ve written in this century was a quickie I cobbled together to automate a tiresome task in Microsoft Word. And that was seven or eight years ago.

Later, I wrote a CRM program in TRS Basic for my boss and received a TI-99/4a as compensation. Amazed how many TI-99 folks commented here. Basic was very good to me ...

When I started college, the Intel 4004 was being designed. The C programming language and UNIX operating system were being developed (unbeknownst to me). I did most of my programming in BASIC on ...

For those of us old enough to remember the beginnings of the microcomputer revolution, we can look back fondly on ‘the programming environment is the OS,’ a ton of BASIC programs, and t… ...

More information: Joan Arnedo-Moreno et al, Programming Fun(damentals): Using commercial video games to teach basic coding to adult learners, Entertainment Computing (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.entcom ...

After BASIC, in the early 1970s, Niklaus Wirth developed Pascal, another language meant to solely be a tool to teach students computer programming concepts. “This language was not really developed to ...

Why is programming so hard? Because it’s no longer about programming. Allow me to elaborate. I wrote my first line of professional code back in 1987. It was an application written in BASIC that did ...