BASIC is 50 years old!

[Don Shepherd]

(04-13-2014 09:57 AM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  The problem is that this works fine if English is your mother tongue. But what if not?
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Nowadays, programming isn't needed to operate a computer.
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But I feel old sometimes.

I think that the inventors of BASIC were trying to address a very specific problem in 1963. They weren't concerned with inventing an international programming language. They recognized that colleges and universities would produce the future leaders, managers, and CEOs of major industries and government agencies, and they thought these people should have some exposure to the power of the computer. The future leaders of industry were thought to be mainly liberal arts students, and existing programming languages at that time (FORTRAN and COBOL) were considered too technical for those students to grasp. So BASIC was born.

(Given the current rotten state of government and politics, especially in the US, perhaps a course in "how to be responsible and have integrity" might have been a better choice than learning BASIC.)

BASIC grew beyond that original limited purpose because it was small and simple and easily ported to other minicomputers and, of course, microcomputers.

Yes, many of us are old, in fact. But that's ok, it's the natural order of things.