Has Basic ever been any use?

I was getting some knowledge about very old PCs, like Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and the first DOS/Windows PCs. I came across the BASIC language, and some say it's the language that made programming popular, but apart from cringeworthy turorials for kids it doesn't seem to be a language that really could be used for serious stuff.

In fact, I remember my uncle said once that Pascal or assembly were the languages one would use in more serious contexts, BASIC being more of a toy.

So I wonder, did BASIC have dynamic memory management like C? Could it be used in professional scenarios? And was it used by some important software developers?

Or was it just a toy language all along?

Other urls found in this thread:

docmanhattan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
fourtwonine.com/2014/10/22/5334-how-marketing-in-the-80s-killed-computer-science-for-women/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration
-Dijkstra

Hahah le xd le quote, if this was reddit you would be getting big upvotes but I'm sorry it isn't.

I want arguments, not retarded quotes (even if they're from a genius such as Dijkstra)

basic is practical for quickly peeking and poking at memory i guess

Could you elaborate?

commodore basic was so bad, you needed to poke and peek at memory just to get anything done

this quickly taught people how memory worked and could eventually lead to them understanding asm better

Aahhh the way you cheated in ZX Spectrum games by poking stuff

Lmao when you space your lines by tens so you aren't FUCKED by having to go back and insert.

pretty much how cheated in every game made in basic

Is that a mechanism similiar to accessing memory addresses in C or Assembly?

Spoken like a true fucktard.

Basic is good to learn the basic of things.
Specially modern basic that support things like functions and not having to number every line etc..

What are those tens in the code exactly?

Everyone who uses quotes because he's too stupid to word concepts by himself isn't even worth (You)ing.

There are fucking studies about why people who like quotes are more stupid.

Did you have to number them or did code editors already have the numbers?

there was no code editor on most old computers

you had the basic interpreter and that's it

Why the fuck would people in the 70s or 80s use this shit if they already had C which could do everything better?

I mean, Basic also looks harder to write code in, despite being less efficient

My first programming was in basic. I made this back in the 90s on my friends dads apple ][ and he recently discovered it and sent me a pic. Awww memories. Actually, we first started out with these cool cards where you type out the code and execute it, we didn't understand what we were typing, it all looked like goboldygook to me, but when you run it (after finding all the typos), it would end up being a game or animation. Anyone remember those game cards?

Like the python interpreter? You wrote the shit and it ran it? How did you save code?

Basic organized the code by the number of the line you typed.
You could do your code with
1
2
3.. etc
but if you needed to insert a line between those lines, you were FUCKED, so instead you did 10,20,30 etc so you could come with a 11,12.. etc in case of need to insert.

Every line begins with a number. The program goes from line number to line number, if it hits a GOTO 156, it will jump to line 156 and keep going.

So if you number your lines 1,2,3,4,5 and decide you need to add a line after 2, you're screwed. You need to renumber the entire rest of the program. So instead you go 10,20,30,40,50 and have ten lines of room to insert anywhere you want.

I had to learn basic for a programming class in highschool, because "It would teach the basics I needed to know to learn modern languages like C++"

No, it was utter trash and literally killed my interest in programming until I started taking some C++ courses in college.

Fuck basic

Basic also had unnumbered code execution.
To save the program you generally did something like save"program.bas"

>they already had C which could do everything better?
most people didn't and it would've been unpractical even if they did have it

the only game i know of that was written in a high level language was wizardry and that's only because it's a RPG so it doesn't need to do 60 FPS arcade-like action

i guess it's like a python interpreter

C64 basic had a SAVE command that would save whatever was in memory to a floppy disk or cassette

Woah, that's fucking fucked up hahaha

I'm thinking of all the poor guys who had to insert 11 lines between one and another cursing like hell

In this case you just put a goto (or gosub if feeling fancy) to somewhere else in the code.

Nostalgic and cute. Would be nice to see that running

Really? There was no labels or anything even? How the fuck was this still being used for so long?

you could comment your code though

That's when the whole GOTO debate started I guess?

And could you do something like

10 Print "First Line"
30 print "third line"
20 print "second line"

Would lines be printed in order?

Simple programs look like python

Complex programs look like spaghetti hell

I'm glad I never had to learn this shit

Can't you do that in like every language?

most computers had basic built into them

meaning that you would turn on the computer, and you would immediately be sent to BASIC, way simpler than using C, at least for very small programs

What do you mean by cards?

It came with the computer.
nope.
It would memorize it as
10 PRINT "First Line"
20 PRINT "third line"
30 PRINT "second line"

Actually, that was quite useful to make several almost identical lines, because you could just write a line, press enter, then go up, change the number and parts that change and press enter again and again and again, and it would register as several different lines.

I mean, what would the code I initially wrote display?
Could you write lines in a random order but ordering them via numbers?

I fucking remember those cards!
There were also those old magazines with tutorials about BASIC coding, we didn't really understand much and would just tweak some code until it worked, we were code monkeys back then hahah

Nice to see youngsters interested in our old programming languages anyway, it brings back memories

A piece of cardboard with some artwork on it, and a number of lines of code. You had to type out the code to see what it did. We couldn't fully read yet. I was in grade 2 or 3. It was like instead of getting a disk, you were given a card with the code to run on your computer.

That's awesome! At least back then they gave you the code for everything and you wouldn't just run shitty executables without knowing what they did

great memories

Yeah we could basically (unintended pun) code before we could read

It allowed an inexperienced person to actually write simple programs and gave people with more experience an option to write quick and dirty program that would still get what they want done.

Some BASIC Italian nostalgia:

docmanhattan dot blogspot dot it/2013/07/commodore-computer-club-rivista.html
(Sorry having to censor it like this or spam filter would not let me post)
It's fun because BASIC actually made programming something every kid did back then! Even my sisters who aren't really tech savvy would tweak with that code and try to display stuff on our C64

BASIC was marketed as the language that would make programmers obsolete because "anybody could do it".

Obviously it didn't hold up to such lofty ambitions. But it WAS used for simple in-house commercial apps.

If you want to see a truly worthless language, check out LOGO

Doc Manhattan has the best nostalgia articles about 80s pop culture.
Among the BASIC ones this is the one that always kills me:
docmanhattan dot blogspot dot it/2010/07/scuola-con-il-computer-sorridendo.html?m=1

It would display as you wrote.
But then when you listed the code (with list generally), it would display it by the number order.

why the fat spy in Witcher 3 knows about programming?

yeah sort of but there was no virtual memory so you had access to the full to system memory. It had basic, well, BASIC commands but nothing that we'd call a system libraries now. If you wanted to do anything besides basic operations (print, read, etc) you have to peak (read) and poke (write) to specific memory locations. Literally setting bits in memory to get the machine to do things. Want to change the text color? poke. Want to change the bg color? another poke.

BWAHAHAHAHA LOGO!
The article I just posted here: Also talks about that, the author says the book his mother gifted him for his birthday (a book explaining "gombiuders" to the poor italian kids) was a fucking LOGO shill, and while LOGO had the potential of making even a retard like he was able of doing cute drawings, he was already attending a LOGO course from a lady that was also smoking hot so he could care less about that book's author's opinion.

Those clothes.
God, you're bringkng back memories, young one.

BASIC may seem shitty by now but it was the Java of our generation in some way.

Wasn't it kinda like Java in it's intentions?

It was actually the operating system in many cases.

What was so shitty about LOGO?

I believe BASIC was used for real commercial applications on many late-70s/early-80s minicomputers. e.g. PDP-11 running RSTS.

well java runs in the JVM so it is sorta an OS. As much of an OS as there was in the 80's anyways

Isn't there some list of programs made in Basic?

God I'm loving this nostalgia thread. Best thread in a long while here.

So would the basic interpreter basically be the only thing mediating between you and the CPU?

Yes.

Anyone had this too?

Also it was the place from where you launched your programs, operated the disk drive/cassete, did bootloading stuff etc..

Sort of. There was a BASIC port for EVERYTHING and it had no system type calls, so BASIC code could be ported from architecture to architecture with little change, as long as there was an interpreter available. But where Java DOES compile into a compressed machine-readable format, BASIC was originally just an REPL language

We had this in Italy.

Back when they gave you the code instead of shitty CD roms.

They would also give you cassettes sometimes and we would copy them and sell them to less tech savvy friends. Woaaah memorieees

It did literally nothing but screen output as you used language features to draw shapes with a fucking turtle

What's the real difference? I mean, doesn't the .class file of Java have a REPL-like behavior too during runtime?

Anyway I think another similarity eith Java is, making coding a new level easier and accessible to less skilled users. My wife who's a literature graduate now does Java programs for a living, but she couldn't into C with system calls, memory management and all that shit.

Okay I was reading the Wikipedia page and it was dumb as hell

holy shit this cringe

Wow a BASIC nostalgia thread

Let's do these more often

I had this

Java has type safety, utilizes protected memory, optimized code reordering, libraries, kernel interfaces, and garbage collection, and the JRE is basically a JIT compiler.

BASIC was basically a program that parsed a script.

We used to type in ML programs in hex from "Run" magazine. Some were pretty good.

What's the point of that?

How come it had shills?

>>Really? There was no labels or anything even?
There were in some dialects.

What about Python? What differentiates it from BASIC?

So that's what happened...

Pic related

It's fun cause back then we would say our parents we needed the C64 "for studying", while all we did was playing rudimental videogames lol

I fucking weared off mine playing a shitty port of PacMan

You wrote it down and typed it in later
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program

No one ever actually studied (at least not the school things) on a Commodore 64

What about SmallTalk?
Was it actually good?

And Pascal?

No pain no game (literally)

LOGO was a Lisp dialect, and to 80s programmers, Lisp programmers were the Crossfit Chads that never shut the fuck up about Crossfit

Ah yes, back in the days when 3 out of 4 programmers were women.

I haven't used Smalltalk but it was reflective, which during it's time was extremely impressive. It was also OOP at a time when C++ wasn't an industry standard yet. Unfortunately it never grew beyond a curio language.

Pascal, on the other hand, enjoyed a lot of time as a major production language. It was originally marketed as a "teaching language", almost an anti-thesis of BASIC in terms of it being a simple language that also promoted good programming practice. The OOP extension, Object Pascal, flourished for some time under Delphi, which competed with VB for RAD dominance in the late 90s.

It's fun cause in the 70s and 80s a lot of women would learn BASIC and program.
When did it become a men only thing?

So was Pascal better than BASIC in BASICally everything? How did it compare to C?

Pascal was FAST, way faster than BASIC. But it was still abstracted via interpretation, and would never compete with a compiled language like C

In italian it was even more cringe: it had commands translated in italian (only language ever to do that) and you would fucking type SULAPENNA or GIULAPENNA

FYI there is still not high-level language with such deep support that can compete with C in speed

So my uncle was right when saying Pascal was so good

I wonder that too. I remember that our coding teacher in middle school was a woman too. And man it was a hot one.

This thread show how fucking old we are

npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

This is an interesting theory. Basically in those years a lot of adult programmers were women, but the young girls stopped coding after a while since pop culture started depicting computers as a men's thing, and here we are.

fourtwonine.com/2014/10/22/5334-how-marketing-in-the-80s-killed-computer-science-for-women/

I think it was because computers were used back then as a tool for calculations, but once the personal computer came out and its possibilities known, men became more interested in the computers themselves. If you know what i mean.

I wonder how a modern basic computer would be.

BASIC was originally designed as a teaching language. The majority of programming that was done when it came out was in assembly. So BASIC tried to emulate the jmp (jump) statement with goto. In assembly pretty much all branching and looping is done with the jmp statement which went to real hardware addresses instead of line numbers like BASIC.

Its a travesty that BASIC got used as the default shell language for personal computers in the 70s and 80s when they could have used Forth or APL interpreters

Not even worth the worry

I think this is part of the truth
When computers were first entering the workplace, they were mostly used for accounting and recordkeeping, which were two of the mainstream avenues women used to enter the workforce at the time. Most systems engineers were still men, with a few notable exceptions like Judy Estrin.

In the 70s, PC's started to become a reality and computing left the workforce and became a hobbyist activity. Scientific American, Popular Mechanics and other high-profile magazines targeted at the educated male reader started running advertisements for kits.

Suddenly, as others in the thread have noted, computers became a male endeavor. The USE of computers, however, STILL TO THIS DAY maintains a female majority. I know you guys don't like anything remotely SJW'ish, but it makes you think.

The truth is not SJWish.
Everyone knows that there's a huge army of solitaire playing receptionists over the world.

underated bost