We now have Visual Basic, but original BASIC used line numbers in front of every line, usually incremented by 10, so program might look like:
10 PRINT “Hello World!”;
20 GOTO 10
Tag Archives: Gorillas
Write your first program
Way back in the the late ’70s and early ’80s, when PCs were becoming more popular as consumer devices, the programming language of the time was BASIC, which was itself an acronym for ‘Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.’ Ironic, then, that the link is a TIME article lauding fifty years of the language. It’s a cumbersome name, but it was the layman’s first exposure to programming and to what it could do, and it was easier to understand than the Assembly language that was used by serious programmers like those in the picture at the link, and it’s even more understandable than the languages we have today such as C# (pronounced “C sharp”) and Java. If you’d like to experiment with C#, Microsoft makes the IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, free to download and there are really great tutorials at the C# link as well as at learnvisualstudio.net.
