Saturday, October 08, 2022

The Enduring Appeal of BASIC

 Back in 2018 I started the BASIC Programming Language group on Facebook.  Since then it has grown to more than 7000 members, and the posting has only accelerated.  What I find really interesting about it is that the membership suddenly began to grow very rapidly in the last few months, more than doubling.

When a member wants to post for the first time there are a couple of questions that they need to answer, and I approve or deny the right to post based on the answers, the other groups the person belongs to and I also factor any pending comments.  The overwhelming majority of the requests to post are approved.

One of the questions is, what is your first BASIC or your preferred version of BASIC?

It becomes clear that there are so many different versions of BASIC that people use and have used.  I find this to be very impressive.  Additionally there are a bunch of people in the group who have written their own versions of BASIC, including myself (Liberty BASIC).  This sort of thing is continually ongoing.  BASIC is not a dead language at all!

Another important thing is that there are people of all ages all over the world who are still using and learning BASIC.