Brane2 wrote:Why force basic on everyone ? What's so great about it ?
You do realise this was all way back in the 1980s? Yes there were other languages, but very few for the fledgling microcomputers of the day.
The Jupiter Ace had Forth. That sold "well". But BASIC was the most popular, given no doubt, that it stands for
Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Emphasis on"beginners".
Switch on, start typing. Direct commands get something to happen right now, or type a stack of commands to run as a "script" at some future point. None of this Amiga stuff where you switch on, load the Workbench, then start typing.
Thinking about that, Python on the Raspberry Pi, using Thonny, is very similar to BASIC back in the day. Direct commands or a script. Job done.
Fortran, COBOL, Pascal were pretty much either not implemented or available on micros back then. C was, on the Spectrum at least, available -- it's where I taught myself C, on a Spectrum with a tape drive and Hisoft C.
I did have Metacomco C and Pascal on my QL, when they became available, but by then I was working in IT and could actually afford to buy new languages to experiment with.
What was the language available for some of the very first "home" computers? Bill Gates' Basic.
BASIC was almost all there was back then, unless you had a mainframe (which I didn't have, but used a few, daily, for the next 20 odd years) and those pretty much only used COBOL.
Plus, the Biggie, BASIC was
designed at Dartmouth to be used as a teaching language. That was it's job and one it did
reasonably well. These days, Scratch then Python seems to be the way, and why not, we have the power and resources to implement it, even on a Raspberry Pi Zero. CPU/RAM is more easily available these days, and much cheaper.
Too many people these days poo poo BASIC from a position of hindsight. A bit like saying "oh, I
never use GOTO" -- I call bullshit. Yes GOTO can be bad, spaghetti code for example, but it can also be the best solution. And let's see anyone write a decent sized Assembly Language application without using a "goto".
SuperBASIC was a huge step forward in as much as it was
structured. Nothing else at the time came close. Most other Basics had FOR- NEXT as the only structure. GOSUBs helped a bit, but SuperBASIC had those and REPeat loops, and proper FuNctions and PROCedures. I'd even go so far as to say that it was slightly Pascalish.
What languages did you use on your first micro? And when? Back in the 80s or much later when things had moved on.
Cheers,
Norm.