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When does BASIC not become BASIC?

Chuck(G) said:
So if "standard" is an issue, how many here use "True BASIC"?

Human language constantly evolve--few people speak in the manner of Shakespeare--and he coined new terms--today.
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And this is why nobody calls Old High German Englsh. They evolve to the point that what once was is no longer comperhensible to virtually anyone.

Visual Basic is geared towards getting somet hing up and running as fast as possible and has facilities specifically for Windows gui programming. Ok, so. You can't just drop a batch of code that would compile in M$ Basic and have anything worthwhile come out the spiggot. It's not the same basic we all played with in junior/high school.

I'm not of the ilk that calls C++ a new language. But C# sure as heck is. Remember what the OP asked. Java isn't C. But it seems it's a lot closer to C syntactically then VB is to plain old basic. Do we call C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, etc. C?
 
tipc said:
And this is why nobody calls Old High German Englsh. They evolve to the point that what once was is no longer comperhensible to virtually anyone.

Visual Basic is geared towards getting somet hing up and running as fast as possible and has facilities specifically for Windows gui programming. Ok, so. You can't just drop a batch of code that would compile in M$ Basic and have anything worthwhile come out the spiggot. It's not the same basic we all played with in junior/high school.
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You could do it. It is possible to place a QuickBASIC program into a command button procedure and the code can be made to run similarly. One change would be directing PRINT to a target since VB has more potential places to send output. The end result would be similar to having the button launch a VDM running the QuickBASIC program. The changes will be less than would be needed to take source code between various implementations of line number MS BASIC.
 
FORTRAN IV doesn't. Vector/matrix extensions (ANSI Fortran) didn't come about until F90. F77 has multidimensional arrays, but no matrix syntax.

There were many instructional FORTRAN-type languages around the same time. Consider, for example, IITRAN or PUFFT or 1620 GOTRAN.

Here's a familiar BASIC program with MAT statements (attached):

Actually, I think that BASIC was inspired by JOSS more than FORTRAN.
 

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From the above discussion I was 65% interested in finding out more about the origin of BASIC not covered in the video.
That documentary mentioned a predecessor to BASIC called DART, so looking into that I found this page on DOPE: http://troypress.com/dope-dartmouth-oversimplified-programming-experiment/
which mentions DART, Algol and Fortran as influences, and influenced BASIC in turn. The wiki page on DOPE expands on that a little bit, and suggests its line numbering idea predates JOSS.

Regarding JOSS, I had no idea that DEC had actually modified I/O Selectrics as terminals onto a PDP-6, but that is another rabbit hole.
 
Of course, back in the day when working with VAX Basic Plus, we used to call it "BASCALTRAN". It had all of the BASIC stuff about it (line numbers, standard string and array operations). But you could also forego line numbers, use higher level control structures (WHILE loops and the like). It also had COMMON blocks.

It was designed to be interoperable with the other languages in the VAX family.

What it lacked, what many BASICs have always lacked, is any real sense of dynamic memory. And, mind, this is not completely true. Many BASICs have things like the REDIM statement which can reallocated (and, indeed, expand) arrays and the like. But this is different from fine grained dynamic memory of Pascals 'new' or C's 'malloc'. Harder to do an incremental linked list in BASIC than in those others.

Visual Basic while lacking line numbers, is still a comfortable arena for BASIC programmers. All of the I/O is available, PUT, GET, INPUT, PRINT, PRINT USING. The math is the same, FOR loops are FOR loops, global scope still a big thing. The event processing is a complete wildcard, or course.

While someone COULD port legacy code to VB with just some awareness of line numbers, etc. most folks wouldn't. They'd rather rewrite it to take advantage of the new facilities for variable naming and such. But if you were hard pressed to get some legacy code up, it could be done with not as much change as one would think. Idiomatically, it would result is "Bad Visual Basic".
 
The first programming that I ever did was BASIC on a teletype. IMO, the most productive tool ever written to knock a commericlal-quality GUI out with was Visual Basic 6.

Supposedly, Bill Gates "made" the developers write it, and they tried to kill it for years after that. They couldn't kill it, so they made it overly complex and buried it (.NET).
 
The major problem I have with VB.NET is that many of the new .NET features didn't result in new VB functions. Thus, VB.NET ends up with a sort of clunky BASIC syntax overlaid on C# but without all the benefits of going to C#.
 
Slob said:
The first programming that I ever did was BASIC on a teletype. IMO, the most productive tool ever written to knock a commericlal-quality GUI out with was Visual Basic 6.
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Wisely or not, we're still using it at my workplace. It's honestly downright appalling that, in the last twenty years, there still hasn't been a unified GUI-oriented development framework anywhere near as simple to sit down and get stuff done with - all the more so when you consider how badly VB6 measures up on things like performance, multithreading, memory management, integration with external libraries, or even basic stability these days.
 
When I was 12 my father brought home a TRS-80 Model III. Within a month I was writing my own software in BASIC. BASIC is the reason I set my sights on a career in IT. I have probably used every single implementation of BASIC since, with my favorite being the QuickBasic and VB versions (up to 6) by Microsoft. I still write software in BASIC to this day with a modern version of QuickBasic called QB64 ( https://www.qb64.org/portal/ ).

I never understood the hate for BASIC. I wrote many useful pieces of software using QuickBasic 4.5, Visual Basic for DOS Pro, and Visual Basic for Windows back in the early to mid 90's for a corporation I was employed with. Heck, my home town's city employee drug testing program was written by me in VBDOS back in 1994 and they used that piece of software until 2010.

A good implementation of BASIC to me means a language I can sit down with, bit-bang code out quickly, compile, and move onto the next project. Heck, Python is even very BASIC like for that matter.
 
Nobody (I think) is disparaging BASIC. Like a lot of other languages, however, it's very tolerant of bad programming practices.

After all, MCBA made their fortune on their small business suite, which was coded entirely in BASIC (I think DG's dialect initially). They still have a sizeable customer base still using their "classic" software.
 
I never realized people were still coding with some form of BASIC in their workplace.

On LinkedIn for example, it seems to be more about Java(script), C (whatever flavour you desire) or Python, so if you have skills at a programming language, VB or .NET Framework I think is the closest thing they recognise and too bad if you're coming from an Pascal, even Delphi doesn't cut it for them anymore.
 
I still program in a dialect of BASIC on a weekly basis for work. VBA behind MS Office (Excel specifically).

It's really stretching the definition of BASIC, but it's a dialect nonetheless. .
 
People have programmed some crazy stuff using VBA for Excel since everybody has access to Excel in the office and IT would frown on people installing something else in a non programming environment.
 
I guess what was going through my mind is a sense of 'Are companies still look for people to code in BASIC?', instead of someone finding a job back in 1991 for a company looking to employ someone with the skills of writing BASIC code and 30 years later are still working there, but using something up-to-date.
 
Companies are looking for 10 years of programming experience on whatever new fad that came out last year.
 
Unknown_K said:
Companies are looking for 10 years of programming experience on whatever new fad that came out last year.
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:lol: That's a bingo.

At our shop, anyway, the thing is that the entire line of business is a single software product (plus add-ons, support, and related services) that was originally written in VB 27 years ago, and had been expanding in feature set and complexity for 14 years by the time VB was officially declared a "legacy" product. And while it would've been possible to make the jump to VB.NET at some point in the last 13 years, Microsoft's toolchain for that was/is essentially useless in any project of meaningful complexity, meaning that such a project would essentially involve a not-quite-ground-up rewrite of the whole application suite. That'd be a non-trivial task even if this wasn't a mom-'n-pop operation headed up by someone with no formal training as a programmer and whose other primary developer just retired this past fall, but as it stands we'd be juggling any such effort with the necessary ongoing development efforts on the O.G. version of the program to keep fixing bugs and adding/tweaking features in order to get people to want to fork out for the next major version. We've already had to bring in a consultant to help out with an exit strategy as Microsoft finally degrades Access integration from "legacy" to "deprecated" to "just plain broken" with successive Office updates (without outright telling anyone that that's what they're doing, natch.)

Contrastingly, VB (currently) just works, creakiness aside, and the core runtime is (nominally) supported for the lifetime of Windows 10, which is supposedly "the last version," so...there you go.
 
Unknown_K said:
Companies are looking for 10 years of programming experience on whatever new fad that came out last year.
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LOL, yep! Looking through the employment ads over the last three years has been hilarious. It's like IT departments are not run by IT professionals any longer.
 
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