BASIC is a rediscovery of last months to me. As "most programmers" I classified it as a language completely unfit for any serious work.
It turns out there are quite a few successful and popular projects using BASIC for specific applications, such as micro-controller or mobile programming. I had to deal with some internal barrier to give these projects a try.
There's still a ton of BASIC code being used and maintained today. Most of it by businesses. Back in the day (70s and 80s) the class of code was known as "Business BASIC"; tons of compilers and interpreters geared for business use were available on all computing platforms (IIRC, there's a version of BASIC for the Cray supercomputers of the day).
One very popular variant that's still sold and used today is/was known as the PICK system. It's based around a "multi-value" relational database structure (which is pretty cool all on its own - data is stored in "cubes" - rows, columns, then within each "cell" can be further dimensional data). It's main "claim to fame" was a certain level of interpreter compatibility - code from one vendor could be run on other vendor's products. PICK Basic compiled down to a bytecode which was run by an intermediate "interpreter", which was a kind of virtual machine. The bytecode looked a bit like assembler (and could be coded in directly if you really knew what you were doing). There were even a few companies that made hardware CPUs that could run the bytecode directly (instead of thru an interpreter VM). Think of it as Java before Java was a thing.
There also was (is?) one of the major industrial robot arm manufacturers who sold a version of BASIC geared toward programming their robot arms; I imagine that some of that is still out there running in the "wild".
For the last few months I've been looking back at old computer magazines from the 70's and early 80's, and it surprised me how much heavy lifting was done in BASIC.
Today, BASIC is looked upon as a children's language. But back then, it was widely used for serious work. I can think of a few reasons why:
- It was available on pretty much every platform
- It was usually built-in to the computer, so there was no extra cost
- If the program you wanted wasn't directly cross-platform, the syntax was close enough that you could figure out the differences and adjust it to work on your machine
- Most consumer and small business computers didn't have the horsepower to compile FORTRAN or Pascal or COBOL.
There are probably others, but from what I've been reading in the old mags, those seem to be the big selling points.
