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Software Development / Tech Culture

BASIC at 60: How This Simpler Language Impacted Programming

The BASIC programming language democratized computing — giving almost anyone the tools and skills to write a computer program for school, work, or for their own use.
May 9th, 2024 7:00am by
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Sixty years ago, complex computer programming languages like Fortran, COBOL, and ALGOL were the top developer tools of the day. Using them, however, required huge amounts of study, training, and skills to produce custom applications that would provide useful results on the early computers of the day.

Back then these complex programming languages kept computing in the hands of scientists and researchers and meant that computing was not yet open for broad use by businesses, higher education, individuals and other groups.

But on May 1, 1964, those limits changed when two mathematicians at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, unveiled their first computer program that used the new BASIC programming language they had developed at the school. BASIC aimed to make programming simpler and more approachable by novices, including students who were not trained as programmers. BASIC stood for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and became a groundbreaking and desired programming language that could be used for all applications and on any computer. The beauty and simplicity of BASIC were laid out in its first BASIC instruction manual and a cheat sheet of BASIC commands published by Kemeny.

Analysts: BASIC Brings a Sea Change to Programming

Writing code in 1964 before the arrival of BASIC was not for the meek, said Jack Gold, principal analyst of J. Gold Associates. “When it came out, trying to program a computer was really hard. You either needed to know Fortran — which, if you had entered an extra space, it got kicked out — or you needed to go to Assembly code, which was even worse. When BASIC came out it had the ability to write code in real language, and that was a really big deal.”

It turned out to be just what was needed to unleash the floodgates to a wave of new developers, said Gold. “It really kickstarted the whole development world,” he said. “It was the AI of its time for programmability because it opened computing to a vast sea of potential programmers, and it kickstarted a bunch of stuff in personal computing. There were derivatives of it.”

Even more important, said Gold, was that BASIC provided “a critical stage in getting computing to the next phase and getting a lot of programmers started where the barriers would have been too high otherwise.”

Another analyst, Dan Olds, chief research officer at Intersect360 Research, called the creation of BASIC a watershed event in the tech industry.

“For so many technologists and future industry movers and shakers, BASIC was their first introduction to computers and programming,” said Olds. “It is difficult to gauge the importance and impact of BASIC — it inspired so many to pursue technology careers and gave them that easy first step that led them to understanding and embracing computing technology.”

The biggest driving force for BASIC occurred when it became the default language on personal computers ranging from Atari to Commodore to the IBM PC line, said Olds. “It led to explosive growth in terms of people writing their own programs and, over time, becoming the experts that pioneered the use of more powerful languages that were used to write applications that sped the tech revolution of the 80s and onward.”

And though BASIC today is used mostly as a learning tool, Olds said that it lives on in Visual Basic, which is widely used in Microsoft Office and other applications. “But you can’t underestimate the role BASIC played in attracting and educating future programmers and others who decided to make technology their life’s work,” he said. “The biggest reason behind BASIC’s success was that it was there, right there on your computer, and it worked. You could type in a program that you got from a friend or out of a magazine and it would do something useful or fun! This was a big deal and unprecedented in computing before BASIC.”

BASIC Democratized Computing for Application Developers

For all of its attributes, said Karl Freund, principal analyst at Cambrian-AI Research LLC, perhaps the most important one is that it gave almost anyone the tools and skills to write a computer program for school, work, or for their own use — without having to be a trained developer.

“BASIC ushered in the very first era of democratization of computing,” said Freund. “It was easy to learn, and easy to debug since it was interpreted, not compiled. No more decks of computer cards with strict rules and long wait times to get your errors back from the Fortran compiler. The interactivity of the interpreter was a big deal. While the pros claimed that ‘real men program in Fortran,’ real people preferred BASIC in a heartbeat.”

James Kobielus, a senior research director at TDWI, agrees. “BASIC has kept its popularity for 60-plus years because it remains one of the simplest and most versatile languages for most coding challenges,” said Kobielus. “Even way back then, it was among the first languages that people learned, being taught everywhere as an on-ramp to programming. It was one of the core languages — as well as COBOL and Fortran — taught in my high school in Michigan in the early 1970s. The fact that support for BASIC is in most operating systems has made it a common denominator for cross-platform programmability.”

Its longevity in the world of IT has not been an accident, said Kobielus. “When it was in danger of being overtaken by C++ and other hot new programming languages in the 1980s, Microsoft played a big role in keeping it mainstream when they rolled out Visual Basic in the early 90s. This took BASIC beyond its core of broad adoption in enterprise computing and made it a core language for building a huge range of mid-market and small business applications.”

BASIC’s later competition made huge inroads over time and today dominate the world of programming, Kobielus added. “Clearly, Python and JavaScript have challenged BASIC’s core advantages in simplicity, readability, and ease of use. But the continued popularity of Microsoft’s computing platforms — and the associated BASIC programming tools — has kept it from obsolescence. As long as beginning programmers are encouraged to use it to bootstrap their competency in coding and have a vast installed base of Microsoft operating platforms as deployment targets, BASIC will remain a pillar of democratized computing.”

That is quite a testament to BASIC, he said. “Having the assurance that there would be a demand for their BASIC programming skills, people kept BASIC among the core languages that they needed to have supported in every new generation of software development tools,” said Kobielus. “Organizations, having a huge number of legacy BASIC apps to maintain, can’t afford to lose BASIC competency, so they continued to encourage their IT teams to keep their skills and tools for BASIC programming up to date, even as newer languages matched and surpassed BASIC in ease of programming and were used in more new projects.”

Another analyst, Dan Maycock, vice president of professional services at CropTrak, said that BASIC’s 60 years of history have made quite an impact on a huge number of students, developers, and businesses since its arrival in 1964.

“It was designed to allow students [at Dartmouth] to write programs on the then-new time-sharing systems, and it was foundational in demystifying computing for a whole generation,” said Maycock. “Moreover, it powered many of the early personal computers in the 1980s, becoming synonymous with home computing through platforms like the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. In 5th grade, I used a ton of BASIC apps playing games on the handful of Commodore 64s we had in the classroom. It was the first computing platform a lot of us got exposed to — and this was in a small farming town of 8,000 people, so it had a wide reach.”

And though BASIC is not at the forefront of the tech scene as it once was, “it still holds a niche in the IT world, particularly in legacy systems in places like Boeing,” said Maycock.

“It was designed to be understood without a deep background in mathematics or computer science, which made it incredibly popular among beginners and casual users who were just beginning to explore the possibilities of personal computers,” he said. “This spirit of accessibility and creativity is something that continues to inspire even today’s programming environments, but back then it was just so much more accessible to start which was what the industry needed for an ‘on-ramp.’ If you were to look at modern languages, many have inherited BASIC’s ethos of simplicity and user-friendliness, and to me, that is really a testament to its lasting impact on the field of computing.”

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