by Norm Kaiser

Created on: November 25, 2006   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Twenty-five years ago I walked into my local Radio Shack store and was forever changed. On display at the Radio Shack was the brand new TRS-80 personal computer, a machine that an average person could tell what to do using a simple programming language called BASIC. After doing simple things like making the computer print my name all over the screen endlessly or play a crude rendition of Three Blind Mice, I was hooked. Like most 13 year olds of that time, I was fascinated by video games and longed to make my own. The TRS-80 offered that possibility. Soon I graduated from the TRS-80 to the great Commodore 64 and began poring over every book I could get my hands on that discussed the subject of making video games. The overarching message I kept reading, however, was if you want to write games-or any serious software, for that matter-you can't do it in BASIC. Serious programs, I was told and I read, were written in assembly. BASIC was just a language for beginners-after all, the word "beginner's" is the first word in the BASIC acronym.

Back in 1982 or 1983 (and many years thereafter), this notion was largely true. While every personal computer on the market came with its own flavor of BASIC, if you really wanted the machine to fly, you had to get to its guts by writing assembly code. Eventually programmers all over the world discovered the magic of a language called C, which promised all the power of assembly with a slightly easier-to-read syntax. Meanwhile, BASIC seemed ready for the ash heap of programming history.

Some years later, the folks at Microsoft recognized that there was a need for a language that the "average" programmer could use and easily understand-and C was not it. So they developed a language called QuickBasic, a programming language that freed many BASIC programmers from the shackles of the old limitations of BASIC. For example, BASIC programmers could now write programs without line numbers, and those programs could be compiled to standalone .EXE files that a user could run straight off a floppy disk. It was a revolution, and BASIC was reborn. Soon, however, Microsoft released Windows to the world and changed QuickBasic into Visual Basic, and things changed.

Don't get me wrong-Visual Basic is a great language, but it's not BASIC. It's not even close. And as the years have gone by, Visual Basic has gotten less and less like BASIC and more and more like C++. Eventually the visual drag-and-drop development environment (IDE) won the day, and developers

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next Page >>