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About BASIC
BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. BASIC was created in 1964 to allow students to take advantage of the
Dartmouth Time-Shareing System used by computers at the time.
Because most students at the time had never seen a real computer, it was designed as a simpler version of
FORTRAN II which didn't assume a mathematical background.
BASIC has since evolved into a number of dialects and formed other languages (including: VB, VB.NET, VBScript, ASP.NET, ASP, etc.), while BASIC has
become largely obsolete. Although it is still remembered as the first programming language of many.
pros
BASIC was designed as the name suggests to be an easy language that someone can understand or use without much if any experience in
programming. It utilizes lots of words as opposed to symbols, for example,
syntax for an "if then" statement(BASIC's if statement) is "if condition then process end if" (essentially English); for comparison, C++ uses
"if(condition){process}", which to a beginner might be harder to grasp. as opposed to C++ and other serious languages where it takes 50 lines
of code just to open a window, BASIC makes that much easier, in addition, it comes preloaded with geometry, (2D and 3D). Despite all of this
I would not recommend BASIC as a first programming language.
cons
Because of its simplicity, BASIC lacks many features you typically want in a programming language. Because BASIC was created in 1964, it is incapable of multi-tasking
in any form. You cannot attach files, or change the construct (unlike C++ and others). Although it was designed as a beginner language, it starts some bad habits, for example,
GOTO (BASIC's way of making up for it's lack of functions) isn't a good thing for practical programmers get comfortable with, as most other languages don't offer it
, and those which do offer it, have programmers who don't use it as it leads to spaghetti code. Hopping around a program in this manor is a recipe for disaster.
BASIC isn't object oriented, this is another reason that it is rarely used by serious programmers. By itself, BASIC is terrible as an
event-driven language, and dialects have been created to improve this.
My Experience with BASIC
BASIC was my first programming language. I started learning it when I was in 7th grade. I can't remember why I decided to learn it, but i think i found it
by searching "easy programming language", or something like that. I decided to learn it thinking that I could build on it, but by the time I moved on to my second language,
C++ I had no idea what a loop was (I only understood GOTO), and I didn't understand the if, elseif, else
structure. So I essentially had to start from scratch on C++. This is why I would never recommend BASIC to anyone who wants to be a programmer.
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