Such nostalgia! My enchantment with BASIC began when I was 10, and on the bus to summer camp every morning I'd read this dog-eared book: https://imgur.com/a/k

Such nostalgia! My enchantment with BASIC began when I was 10, and on the bus to summer camp every morning I'd read this dog-eared book: https://imgur.com/a/kmBfx7Y https://imgur.com/a/kmBfx7Y I was such a nerd. The counselors didn't know what to make of me. Dad complained I should spend more time outside. Then I grew up and published my first commercial software title, turning that geeky addiction into a career. It was an Outlook addin, created in VB6 around the time a prominent Microsoft MVP called Outlook the "buggiest program to ever come out of Redmond" (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20091231043608/http://www.slipstick.com/emo/2004/up041210.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20091231043608/http://www.slipst...). So in the next rewrite, I created a framework to bring Try/Catch semantics to the language along with stack-tracing error logging - after testing and discarding several equally buggy third party tools purporting to do the same. I gained some hard-learned lessons about instrumentation, coding for readability and debugability, and the importance of good tooling. They've stuck with me to this day, and although most of my work now is in C#, the principles are the same. Thanks mom and dad for buying me that beat up old TRS-80! And thanks Mr. Kemeny and Kurtz for bestowing this beautifully approachable language onto the world, even if your original vision was shamefully bastardized by the time I stumbled upon it. ps. That book in all its glory: http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/Getting%20Started%20With%20Extended%20Color%20Basic%20%28Tandy%29.pdf http://www.colorcomputerarchive.com/coco/Documents/Manuals/H...