[geeks] BASIC

[nate at portents.com]

I've moved this thread to [geeks] where it makes more sense...

> My learning of (Interpreted) BASIC prevented me from understanding
> Object-Oriented Programming models, and I don't think I'm alone in
> this "impairment"...

I've read arguments such as this that claim the opposite:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/print.html

I would tend to agree with that article.

It should be noted, btw, that the third generation of BASIC is Object
Oriented, so your criticism of it's impairment to your learning later OO
languages would primarily apply to generation one and two of BASIC.

> That said, I plan to teach my sone (13 years old) to program in BASIC
> (maybe on a CoCo clone Dragon 64 ;^), "and the cycle of abuse
> continues..."

You could start him there, then maybe move him to something more
structured like FreeBASIC or OO like Gambas to minimize the "abuse".

- Nate

Previous thread from [rescue]:

> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:40 AM, <nate at portents.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 03 Aug 2009, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>>>
>>> But I have nothing but fond memories about hacking on those old Nova
>>> clones, and BITS BASIC had some *really* cool features.
>>
>> No experience with that in particular, but this reminds me of something
>> I've been wondering lately... is there any measure of the impact of
>> BASIC
>> on computing?  The reason I ask is that it wasn't until recently that I
>> realized that Wang 2200 series ran a microcoded interpreted BASIC
>> (dialects such as Wang BASIC and BASIC-2), which other companies have
>> since developed compilers for... I was rather shocked at the idea of
>> microcoding an interpreted language into a computer.
>>
>> All of Microsoft's early success comes from writing and porting it's
>> BASIC
>> interpreter to many computer microarchitectures, and now I'm wondering
>> if
>> it was Microsoft's catering to their developers (which includes all the
>> vertical application "business logic" stuff written in BASIC, a lot of
>> it
>> by people who aren't exactly professional developers I'm sure) that has
>> ensured their success as a platform.  Professionally, I still see IT
>> people writing VBScripts today despite it being de-emphasized, and at
>> least as of 2007, there were still a lot of businesses developing
>> applications in Visual Basic .NET[1]:
>>
>> "According to Forrester Research, 37 percent of enterprises use
>> Microsoft
>> Visual Basic.NET for development and maintenance of their in-house
>> applications. What's more, among .NET developers, 59 percent use Visual
>> Basic.NET as their only programming language."
>>
>> It all makes me wonder if the real reason competitors (such as Mac,
>> Amiga,
>> Atari, Canon Cat, etc.) to the IBM PC running MS DOS had such trouble in
>> the 1980s and 1990s was as much about MS BASIC and all it's badly
>> written
>> (and probably poorly documented yet important) business applications,
>> and
>> their "snowball effect", as it was about the rest of the platform.
>>
>> Anyone have any sense of this?
>>
>> - Nate
>>
>> [1] http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5656359853.html
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