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This is interesting from a historical perspective, but honestly I'm really glad that the era of Basic is gone. Having had a handful of opportunities to work wit

This is interesting from a historical perspective, but honestly I'm really glad that the era of Basic is gone. Having had a handful of opportunities to work with legacy Basic code from a wide variety of programmers, it's just a disaster that always leads to unmaintainable garbage. I'm not even sure it is possible to have well architected Basic. Structuring and modularizing code is ridiculously difficult. The very principles of the language somehow lead to pervasive use of globals and gotos. It's neither functional, nor object oriented. Everything ends up as blocks of mutable procedures, tightly coupled, with red flags everywhere. I'm a very opinionated person about programming languages, and there are plenty of modern language trends that have been bothersome to me. But none of them will be ever as bad as any of the Basic code I have interacted with. I'd rather read and maintain code that went through a unicode-permitted Haskell code golf competition than anything written in Basic.

reaperducer 6y ago
I think that you were exposed to a limited subset of BASIC dialects. There were versions of BASIC that did all of those things and more.
BeetleB 6y ago
Were you dealing with BASIC or QuickBasic or VisualBasic? Also, consider that it may not be the language but the fact that most BASIC programmers tend not to know much about programming...?
- darksaints 6y ago
  It was BASIC, and a little bit of QBasic. In a different realm, I also worked with VBA, which wasn't much better, but I think that was more due to programming inexperience. Admittedly didn't have much exposure to Visual Basic or VB.Net.
II2II 6y ago
While I am not much of a fan of the language itself, it is a thing of the past so it is safe to look at its positive points. If you want to consider the negatives, context is an important factor. One consideration is most BASIC implementations had to run on systems with very limited resources. On early personal computers, that could be 4 kB or 16 kB of RAM. That limited memory had to support both the editor and editor (which needed some RAM to store its state, even if the software itself was in ROM) as well as contain the user's program. Forget about superfluous syntax. Heck, forget about formatting since it was likely tokenized. Earlier versions of BASIC may have run on systems with more resources, but it was designed for education so those resources would have been shared by many users so I don't see the situation being terribly different. Later implementations did take advantage of additional resources, but the language was already on its way out so the impact would be limited.

reaperducer 6y ago

I think that you were exposed to a limited subset of BASIC dialects. There were versions of BASIC that did all of those things and more.

BeetleB 6y ago

Were you dealing with BASIC or QuickBasic or VisualBasic? Also, consider that it may not be the language but the fact that most BASIC programmers tend not to know much about programming...?

darksaints 6y ago
It was BASIC, and a little bit of QBasic. In a different realm, I also worked with VBA, which wasn't much better, but I think that was more due to programming inexperience. Admittedly didn't have much exposure to Visual Basic or VB.Net.

II2II 6y ago

While I am not much of a fan of the language itself, it is a thing of the past so it is safe to look at its positive points. If you want to consider the negatives, context is an important factor. One consideration is most BASIC implementations had to run on systems with very limited resources. On early personal computers, that could be 4 kB or 16 kB of RAM. That limited memory had to support both the editor and editor (which needed some RAM to store its state, even if the software itself was in ROM) as well as contain the user's program. Forget about superfluous syntax. Heck, forget about formatting since it was likely tokenized. Earlier versions of BASIC may have run on systems with more resources, but it was designed for education so those resources would have been shared by many users so I don't see the situation being terribly different. Later implementations did take advantage of additional resources, but the language was already on its way out so the impact would be limited.