Last week <goto> asked Facebook users “What was the first language that you programmed in?” Thank you so much to everyone who voted, we’ve had 299 votes and a definite winner: BASIC
Most popular languages/flavours were:
- BASIC 163 votes
- Sinclair BASIC 23 votes
- Assembler 15 votes
- Pascal 10 votes
- COBOL 9 votes
- C 8 votes
- Visual Basic 7 votes
BASIC being so popular may have been to do with the age of the average person reached by the survey 25-34 year old males, I don’t have that information for the actual respondents, but I’m guessing that most people who used BASIC first are probably 35-50? What do you think?
Sites that teach coding like Codeacademy are doing a great job these days, but lots of people my age talk with great excitement about getting their first machine, typing in the code from a magazine and then hoping it would run. Do we need something like that again? Will the Raspberry Pi, Nanode or the Arduino provide that opportunity?
FORTRAN, FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 2 all got mentioned in your survey responses but weren’t grouped or even mentioned in the final list of results… ;-)
That was “the” computing language that got taught post O-level for anyone who was going to do Computer Science in the late ’70s/early ’80s… otherwise, it was BASIC/Assembler in one form or another. Nowadays, I think JavaScript or Python make more sense. The excitement, for me, was writing a program that worked. I don’t think the language mattered. Simpler programming languages may allow a greater feeling of success, who knows?
Maybe a little late to post here, but I’ve only just found it…
Just to add another count to the “BASIC”… It was my introduction too in about 1978 on an HP Desktop computer, swiftly followed by the Apple II. Now I program mostly in C and PHP.
(First) Language choice is always hotly debated, but one thing I’ve never really seen debated is the actual steps taken to get your first program going. BASIC is simple – turn the computer on, type:
10 PRINT “Hello”
RUN
and there you go.
Almost all other systems require some sort of editor, compiler, (or Integrated Development Environment; IDE), knowledge of the filing system, operating system and so on. This increases the knowledge (and time) required before you even write your first line of code!
So lets Return to BASIC – get people interested, and hooked on something very simple and easy to use, then I’m sure (as I did) they’ll quickly move on to learning new languages, new operating systems and start to produce new ideas of their own.
Gordon
As a 40-something I was very surprised to see that BBC Basic did not feature in your poll. I thought all British schools had at least one Beeb for students to use. Didn’t IT education work in the 70′s and 80′s either. Maybe the reality was, and still is, that people who want to know ‘how’ computers work and get excited about programming were then, and perhaps always will be, in the minority. Good luck to the GoTo Foundation, every little helps.