Top ten reasons why you should use BASIC? Please chime in!

[Carl Gundel]

Top ten reasons why you should use BASIC? Please chime in!

I posted this question in the Facebook group, so I figured I'd do it here too!  :-)

[ntech]

A great learning curve, straightforward GUI programming, and a great community.

[tsh73]

Very very very vague question. Such ambiguity makes my inner perfectionist self sick.
(OK that's my problem, not yours).
Why do one "should" use anything, at all? (does my mom should use BASIC? What for?)
Why BASIC? Some languages better fit for some tasks, there is no silver bullet.
Why ten reasons, why not seven or even one?
What kind of BASIC? BASICs differ so much, so reasons to use (or not use) of VB.Net is quite different from LB or some other BASIC.

Could you explain what you are hoping to get in response in some other words?

[mknarr]

I was an Engineering Associate in the semiconductor industry before personal computers. I picked up a book in the library and tried to teach myself FORTRAN. What a joke. I knew nothing about the logic of programming and the gobbled gook of FORTRAN didn't make it any easier. But I had access to the big computer in Princeton over a teletype and could use Princeton Basic which I picked up in a hurry because the commands made logic. Since then I have been through at least a half dozen flavors of Basic and besides picking up the quirks of each, the transfer was easy. My point is, Basic is easy to pick up because many of the commands are intuitive and the logic is easy to build on. I've since took a machine language course and it was easy as well as programming the first Wang Desk Top Calculators because I now had the logic of programming and just had to learn the commands. I actually got so good at programming the Wang that they came to me to write programs for them. I eventually wrote many programs for my company that were used in manufacturing.

[Sver]

alycesrestaurant.com/lbpe/TenUnusualThingsAboutLB.html

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When i asked other people why the use a different language, then the asked, I can find a lot of snippets, function, examples
for it.

Missing:
A startpage for beginners (forum, tutorial, university, old newsletters, rosetta,...and a (basic) snippets database.

[pandawdy]

1. It's easy to learn and use.
2. It's been around for many many years, so it's well documented.
3. In the case of Liberty Basic, this forum is available so people can ask questions and get help.
4. Many versions of Basic are still free.
5. Where I work, the owner has used Basic to write almost everything. Our products use several different micro controllers. This company has grown from a garage to a 80,000 square feet facility and I can only guess how much the company is worth. I'm guessing at least 100 million. That tells me that Basic is not just for someone to tinker with, but a serious programming language. If anyone is curious, the company mostly uses Bascom for programming microcontrollers and visual basic (old visual basic version 6) for PC software. I have also written some software in Liberty Basic that works with our products but I have not yet shared this with the company.

That's all I can come up with for now. If I think of more I'll post again later.

[Carl Gundel]

Sept 22, 2019 13:10:22 GMT -5 pandawdy said:

1. It's easy to learn and use.
2. It's been around for many many years, so it's well documented.
3. In the case of Liberty Basic, this forum is available so people can ask questions and get help.
4. Many versions of Basic are still free.
5. Where I work, the owner has used Basic to write almost everything. Our products use several different micro controllers. This company has grown from a garage to a 80,000 square feet facility and I can only guess how much the company is worth. I'm guessing at least 100 million. That tells me that Basic is not just for someone to tinker with, but a serious programming language. If anyone is curious, the company mostly uses Bascom for programming microcontrollers and visual basic (old visual basic version 6) for PC software. I have also written some software in Liberty Basic that works with our products but I have not yet shared this with the company.

That's all I can come up with for now. If I think of more I'll post again later.

Thanks.  That's cool.  Years ago I worked at a 45,000 square feet factory.  My boss wrote BASIC programs, and I wrote a lot of software in BASIC, mostly MBASIC and BASIC-80.  There was a BASIC program he wrote on the TRS-80 which I extended to run on a CP/M Kaypro.  It scheduled all the work in the factory.  I also wrote a special text editor and CNC gcode simulator in BASIC.  Later I wrote some stuff in Liberty BASIC v1.x.