In defence of BASIC

[Little stoned kiwi]

Sequence, selection, iteration. With peek and poke for good measure, just be careful with those GOTOs.

[Whiteball]

"Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools" - John Carmack

[Dio]

Sure. And that's one of the greatest conundrums for the software tool designer. If you have a product to deliver, then it's easy to focus on the product. But if the product is a tool in itself, you've got a real problem. How do you stay focused on the right things? It's a very real dilemma.

[KlaxonCow]

[gilesgoat]

Sure. And that's one of the greatest conundrums for the software tool designer. If you have a product to deliver, then it's easy to focus on the product. But if the product is a tool in itself, you've got a real problem. How do you stay focused on the right things? It's a very real dilemma.

Like you stay focused on the product, you at least try to define first what kind of problems/work your tool has to solve/do and also 'the easier way you could solve them by the tool'.

The problem with tools is that they are usually made by engineers that usually :

- do not understand well the target audience ( i.e. is a tool from an engineer for an engineer or is it a tool to be used by totally-non-engineers ? )

- are very bad ui designers ( often cause the above statement )

- thinks as engineers not as "the target audience"

- know lot more about what the tool does/how it works/how it should be used than anyone else other than them that will use it

- tend "by nature" to over-engineer tools ( adding too many options, too many functionalities )

- can get fixated on some aspects of the tool neglecting a bit others that for them are 'less important' ( but not for those that will use it )

- can be bad documentation writers ( despite being the only ones knowing fully how their tool work ) and/or can't be bothered to write it

- never talked or even seen their "final user/final customer" don't know well about their necessities from the tool

Overall are more knowledgeable than anyone else about the tool they are making not to understand well the problems of those that know NOTHING about it and has to use it.

That's what I normally see in certain tools.

[gilesgoat]

Anyway I'd like to say "in its time BASIC wasn't too bad" .. it was the very first thing we had that allowed us still totally NEW to computers "to do something" I will NEVER forget the first time of "10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GO TO 10" .. It was .. something ..

Seriously "where we would have been without BASIC" the fact you can turn on the computer and DO something

[Istar]

I'm with Giles on this one.

That day in early 1981 when I put my pre-teen fingers on the school PET keyboard for the first time was the moment the entire path of my life was laid before me. I knew in that moment what I wanted to do, both for fun and for a living, from that point on - and ### COMMODORE BASIC V2 ### was my first stepping-stone towards really, actually, maybe being Avon.

And here I am at 56, still the professional coder that I imagined I might become back in that Maths class; still enjoying the art and science of creating cool things out of nothing but 0s and 1s; still unashamedly and utterly addicted to the drug that is the unlimited power over machines that we wield.

It started with BASIC, and however primitive and 'uncool' it might seem to modern eyes, that was the key that unlocked everything.

[Barney]

I'm with Giles on this one.

That day in early 1981 when I put my pre-teen fingers on the school PET keyboard for the first time was the moment the entire path of my life was laid before me. I knew in that moment what I wanted to do, both for fun and for a living, from that point on - and ### COMMODORE BASIC V2 ### was my first stepping-stone towards really, actually, maybe being Avon.

And here I am at 56, still the professional coder that I imagined I might become back in that Maths class; still enjoying the art and science of creating cool things out of nothing but 0s and 1s; still unashamedly and utterly addicted to the drug that is the unlimited power over machines that we wield.

It started with BASIC, and however primitive and 'uncool' it might seem to modern eyes, that was the key that unlocked everything.

Good lord, it's like you're describing me. But with a Spectrum.

[skab]

And again, BASIC back then was a great stepping stone on your way to Assembler. If all you know is stuff like while-loops instead of a simple GOTO, how would you wrap your head around how that's done in machine language

And on the C64 it was even more pronounced, since you already had to POKE all the time to do basically anything, replacing that with LDA/STA was a tiny step.