I finally graduated to "more advanced" languages just before I left school. Various broadly similar, albeit more complex, dialects of BASIC were my main creative outlet for the next 10 years. These mammalian traits are not all bad, in an age of dinosaurs. In many ways, it was an excellent match for the computers and users of that era: quick, small, dirty and fun.
Sure, BASIC can lead one into bad habits, but so can any programming language where you're left to your own devices with a manual and a computer. DATA and READ were big for me, as were multi-statement lines, multidimensional arrays (BASIC could be very good at those), 'high-res' graphics, and clever little expression evaluators which could lead you into the Mysterious Lands of Recursion and proper, grown-up programming problems that edged into philosophy.
As Jimbob notes, it's surprisingly close to how CPUs actually work - the move from BASIC to assembler (actually, machine code in my case - hand-translating the mnemonics into decimal, POKEd into the REM statement that was at the start of the program, 'cos that was where you knew to find it in the memory map) was conceptually easier for me than the move from BASIC/Assembler to C - although, again, understanding the compiler output helped.īut oh, the excitement when you moved from one dialect of BASIC to another with more features. Self-taught BASIC kid here, and proud of it. Although I still program almost every day, as I have done for perhaps 3 decades, I've not touched BASIC for many years. BASIC has a similar nostalgia for me, and I say that proudly even though people now sneer at it's many flaws. Old relatives that have passed away exist in some rosy memory deep in my mind. But I'm so BASIC-centric in my memories that I cannot imagine how that scenario would play out. Maybe I'm just the logical type, maybe I would have found some other computer, some other language. I cannot comprehend how different my life would be without it. But that little computer, and that exposure to BASIC. I've never been a part of a religion, I fanatically followed a football team but can easily see how it could have been another one, I've many friends but assume I would have others if they hadn't been there. When I look at my life now I simply cannot imagine it without having those years of BASIC in my childhood. Possession of this device and exposure to BASIC at such a young age (I was 6) was undoubtedly one of the defining turning points of my life. My first computer booted directly into a basic interpreter, as did many others of the time.