Whatever happened to... BASIC?
QI was flipping through an ancient magazine when I came across an advert for the Sinclair ZX80. I learned programming using this, and even taught it back in the day, all in 1K of memory! We used BASIC to develop student projects of quite complex programming, up to A level. Then came the National Curriculum — the cure for which there is no known disease — and programming was dropped from the syllabus. There seems to be a resurgence of programming in schools, but not BASIC. So, whatever happened to it? Alan Bailey
AFor the benefit of other (perhaps National Curriculum-educated) readers, BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The very first version was called Dartmouth BASIC, after Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, where it was invented, in 1964. The language was designed to make it easier for students to master computers, enabling the use of familiar English phrases and syntax instead of arcane machine code.
Its popularity spawned many hundreds of different versions (or ‘dialects’), to the extent that it became the predominant computer-programming language during the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, BASIC is still alive and kicking in many fields. There are even versions for the popular Raspberry Pi single-board computer, such as Chipmunk BASIC — a free download from www.snipca.com/23591.
The creation of the National Curriculum really had little to do with BASIC’S declining popularity worldwide. The reasons are many and complex, but it boils down to the fact that computers and technology have moved on, and with them the necessary programming tools. The internet, for example, didn’t exist in 1964; and modern processors are able to execute and multitask in ways that would’ve been unimaginable back then.
Newer languages, like C# (pronounced ‘C Sharp’) and Python, were either designed for or able to adapt to the rapid pace of change. At the same time, graphical programming tools such as Scratch ( https://scratch.
mit.edu) were developed to offer a friendly introduction to the concepts behind those modern languages — and it’s a tool that’s now used in many primary schools.
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