BASIC is 50 years old!

[Marcus von Cube]

Quote:John Kemeny and I wanted to get away from the computer jargon, even as it We wanted to have our computer commands be ordinary words that everyone would understand,

The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?

There were attempts to internationalize BASIC by MicroSoft: Some versions of MS-Office came with translated versions of VBA. It wasn't a great success, though.

Nowadays, programming isn't needed to operate a computer. When I turned on my first home computer in the 80s I was greeted with MEM? followed by READY and an angle bracket. No way of doing anything with this machine without at least some sense of programming. The least You needed to know was the name of the program to run and how to start it, or, even better, just code your own.

Compare this to smart phones and their users. There isn't even the need to know how to type in text or how to operate other input devices like mice or joy sticks. I don't want to start a discussion of what's "better". But I feel old sometimes.