[rescue] BASIC

[Lionel Peterson]

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

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..."

Lionel

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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--
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com