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[–] • 2 pts 5mo

I loved Basic for simpler programs.

I learned Fortran and C before I learned Basic. I had about 4hrs to learn Basic and write a program for my gf in college - she was an education major and this was a project the professor had given them weeks to write. The objective was to write an educational program for kids.

We were in her college computer lab with PCs one afternoon, circa 1981. We decided to create a hangman spelling game for kids. I'd never used a PC nor done any graphics before but was able to create the stick figure and basic game like display. Built a list of words and used the random number generator to select the word to be spelled. Used the string length function to know how many blanks to display, used audio tones to indicate success or failure before adding a letter to the word display or a body part on the stick man. If the kid failed to spell it after making enough errors to eventually display all of stick man body parts, the final failing guess would draw criss-crossed eyeballs on the stick figure, emit a waa-waa gloomy jingle, and ask if the kid wanted to try another word. Upon a successfully spelled word, a joyful jingle, tell the kid "Good Job!" and ask if they wanted to try another word. The code was over my gf's head, so I went back through the program and commented the living shit out of it. I even wrote it to be "scalable", one could create multiple sets of words, like chapters of a spelling book.

I had an absolute blast that afternoon. The gf got an A+ on her project. Her prof was blown away, knew she had had help, but because of my extensive comments explaining virtually every line of code, the gf could explain what the code was doing and why.

I've written a few large projects in Basic, HPBasic, Visual Basic and probably a few others. I think it was more "fun" than any other language as long as it was up to the task.

Thanks for BASIC, Thomas E. Kurtz!

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[–] • 1 pt 5mo

Thanks for BASIC, Thomas E. Kurtz!

Indeed. Like you I also learned FORTRAN, BASIC, and C. COBOL, was another one. There were probably one or two others, but those were the ones that popped immediately to mind.

Rest in peace, Mr. Kurtz.

[–] • 1 pt 5mo

COBOL, there was no use for it in the engineering fields so I never went for it. I did learn C++, perl, and a maybe a dozen other useful languages, even machine code, plus a plethora of languages used on semiconductor test equipment based on Fortran and C. The last "language" I encountered was Teradyne's IG-XL "test language" (graphical environment) for the Teradyne Catalyst-750 around 2002. It looked like an extension of MS Excel. Far different than writing lines of code. Damn, I still miss those days.

[–] • 0 pt 5mo

You got much more into it than I did. I drifted away from coding into PCs, then into routing and switching networks.

[+] [deleted] • 1 pt 5mo
[–] • 0 pt 5mo

I used BASIC for all kind of stuff when I still had a windows network stack...QuickBASIC was so easy to use and compile executables, I wrote everything in it, including some RSS feed parsers for things.

I miss it's simplicity. Python is supposed to be the "new" BASIC, but all that shit and semicolons and case types floating around just don't stick in my head. I guess I'm old.

[–] • 1 pt 5mo

I bought an HP Basic compiler from a company called Infotek (dunno if it's related to any same named company today) around 1985 for that HP Basic running homebrew rack and stack test system I mentioned earlier. On my final version of the OS code, the execution time for the interpreted HP Basic was around 10.5 Seconds on a reference device. That was orders of magnitude more efficient than what it replaced (manual bench testing), but I wasn't happy. We needed more throughput, we had built 6 of these systems. Equipment utilization was nearly maxed out. I just about had to beg management for the money to buy the compiler vs build more testers <smdh>. The executable knocked the test time for the same reference device down to 1.5s, which increased throughput by 4X !!! ... for the price of a compiler! I saved the compsny a lot of money on that project start to finish! It was a big win. If BASIC execution time is important to you, a compiler is the only way to begin to approach the speed of compiled C code.

[–] • 1 pt 5mo

Back in the golden age...