Born To RUN: Dartmouth Throwing BASIC a 50th B-Day Party 146
theodp writes: "Still hanging on to a dog-eared copy of BASIC Computer Games? Back issues of Creative Computing? Well then, Bunky, mark your calendar for April 30th, because Dartmouth College is throwing BASIC a 50th birthday party that you won't want to miss! From the 'invite' to BASIC at 50: 'At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Kemeny, who later became Dartmouth's 13th president, Professor Tom Kurtz, and a number of undergraduate students worked together to revolutionize computing with the introduction of time-sharing and the BASIC programming language. Their innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world [video — young Bill Gates cameo @2:18]. This year, Dartmouth is celebrating 50 years of BASIC with a day of events on Wednesday, April 30. Please join us as we recognize the enduring impact of BASIC, showcase innovation in computing at Dartmouth today, and imagine what the next 50 years may hold.' Be sure to check out the vintage photos on Flickr to see what real cloud computing looks like, kids!"
Re:We've come a long way (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We've come a long way (Score:5, Informative)
Yes very much so. And VB.Net still puts people off because of that long history. Even though it's pretty much exactly the same functionality as C#. Last I checked, it has some features C# didn't have, the biggest of which is better background compiling. You can add entire classes with actually compiling your project, and Intellisense will work. Maybe C# will do that now, but VB.Net has basically always had this feature.
A developer who converted a lot of VB code from VB7 to .NET said that one difference with C# is that typing is more strictly enforced at compile time. After testing on a sample he discovered that porting to VB.NET was quicker, but converting to C# discovered some obscure bugs in the original code - some of which had work-arounds applied as they had ever been fully understood. We went for the port to C# with the result that the ported application was more stable than the original.
Re:BASIC is where M$ got its start (Score:3, Informative)
What you say is interesting, but I disagree.
People use M$ in the same way they use Di$ney ... to connote money grubbing corporations.
I have never understood that to have anything to do with variables in BASIC.
Though, for all I know, you could be correct. But I've never used it that way.