Today, most programming languages use different types of structural paradigms (such as functions and object-oriented programming), but the easy-to-grasp syntax of BASIC, with its plain English ...

Computers need programming languages to function. That’s just a simple fact of life. However, these languages didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. They were developed by people for explicit ...

BASIC wasn’t designed to change the world. “We were thinking only of Dartmouth,” says Kurtz, its surviving co-creator. (Kemeny died in 1992.) “We needed a language that could be ‘taught ...

First-order functions vs. pure functions. In functional programming, there are two varieties of functions: first-order functions and pure functions. First-order functions. A first-order function takes ...

It's been 60 years since the first BASIC programme ran at Dartmouth College. János Kemény developed the language with a colleague, Thomas Kurtz, with the goal of bringing computing closer to ...

This is why I’ve long argued that BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing. It’s a language for noobs, sure, but back then most everyone was a noob. Throughout the ...

Since the 1960s, BASIC has introduced countless beginners to computer programming. Here's how the language got started, the paths it cleared for Windows and Apple, and where you can still find it ...

It’s with sadness that we note the passing of Thomas E. Kurtz, on November 12th. He was co-inventor of the BASIC programming language back in the 1960s, and though his creation may not receiv… ...

60 years ago, the inventors of the BASIC programming language actually achieved what they had hoped for: simple programming that is accessible to everyone. At 4:00 a.m. on May 1, 1964, the first ...

The first computer language I learned was BASIC, just like you, but the first computer I worked on was a mainframe through a Teletype terminal in classes at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley.