[todd8]

BASIC was almost my first programming language. Ten years before anybody had a home computer (1967), I decided that I would write a program. I was just a kid and I came across a keypunch machine in a small room at my high school. After reading a book on FORTRAN I keypunched a program that was supposed to solve optimization problems over sets of linear equations in a number of unknowns constrained by a set of inequalities. The algorithm for doing this is known as the Simplex Method.

I gave the deck of cards to a friend and a couple of days later I got the fan-fold paper output that listed a bunch of syntax errors and nothing else. I just didn't understand programming very well.

BASIC is what got me on track. I found a book in my local public library on the relatively new language BASIC. It was easy to understand and I practiced writing out the solutions to simple problems with paper and pencil. I didn't have access to a BASIC system, but I learned enough that I could try FORTRAN again (this time on simpler problems). After a few attempts (with the two day turnaround) I was successful and programming became a hobby that eventually led to a career as a real computer scientist.

BASIC was just right. It was concrete enough for a novice to understand while being much more expressive than assembly language. I've never actually run any program that I wrote in BASIC, but I have written programs in scores of languages since and BASIC got me started.

Today, there are better choices for a first language: Python provides students with a lot of power right away, and my daughter learned Scheme as her first language and never had difficulties in later classes with recursion or functions as values.

[Retro79]

Hello, I would like to get in contact with you (todd8) regarding TI and their old software development services. You wrote in another post that you were involved modernizing their stack back then. I'm a hobby computer games researcher and looking for info regarding TI's old programming services of the 70s. I have added an icloud email address to my profile. Could you please reach out? Thanks so much! P.S.: This is not a scam and I'm not some weird prince from your spam emails...

[ikari_pl]

I love this story! You are right, I should have, and wanted to have mentioned Python for everything else than creative coding - I think I got too dragged into that direction. Python is the language that takes the "how" out of the way, and lets you do what you want to do, focusing on the goal.

Scheme, like Lisp, no matter how popular, seem to me a little... esoteric? Even though there's no reason to, they're easy to parse, and enchantingly functional. Maybe that's how BASIC spoiled me, pushing me towards procedural code on day 1? :)