Javascript is the new BASIC

The idea that Javascript is the new BASIC is not unique. Others have made the same observation, here and here. I will add my humble thoughts.

BASIC, not Microsoft's Visual Basic but the elder brother with line numbers, was the popular language at the beginning of the personal computer era.

The popularity of BASIC is not surprising. BASIC was easy to learn and just about every microcomputer had it, from the Apple II to the Commodore PET to the Radio Shack TRS-80. Books and magazine articles discussed it.

Alternate languages were available, for some computers. The system I used (a Heathkit H-89) ran the HDOS and CP/M operating systems, and there were compilers for FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and Pascal. But these other languages were expensive: a FORTRAN compiler cost $150 and COBOL $395 (in 1980 dollars).

The biggest competitor to BASIC was assembly language. Assemblers were modestly priced, but the work necessary for the simplest of tasks was large.

BASIC was available, and we used it.

BASIC wasn't perfect. It was designed as a teaching language and had limited programming constructs. While it had an 'IF' statement, most variants had no 'IF/ELSE' and none had a 'WHILE' loop. Variable names were a single letter and an optional digit. It had no support for object-oriented programming. It was interpreted, which carried the double drawbacks of poor performance and visible source code. Your programs were slow, and the only way to distribute them was by giving away the source (which, given BASIC's limitations, was unreadable for a program of any significant size).

BASIC was popular and reviled at the same time. Dykstra famously declared "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." But it wasn't just him; we all, deep down, knew that BASIC was broken.

We were forced to program around BASIC's limitations. We learned some good habits and lots of bad ones, some which haunt us to this day. Yet it's limitations forced us to think about the storage of data, the updating of files, and the complexity of calculations.

We also looked forward to new versions of BASIC. While some computers had BASIC baked into ROM (the Commodore C-64 and the IBM PC), other computers had ways of using new versions (the IBM PC had a 'BASICA' that came with PC-DOS).

BASIC was not just the language of the day but the language of the future.

Today, Javascript is the language that is available and easy to learn. It is not baked into ROMs (well, not usually) but it is baked into browsers. Information about Javascript is available: there are lots of web pages and books.

Like BASIC, Javascript is not perfect. No one (to my knowledge) has claimed that learning Javascript will permanently stunt your programming skills, but the feeling I get from Javascript programmers is similar to the feeling I remember about BASIC programmers: They use the language and constantly hope for something better. And they are working around Javascript's limitations.

BASIC was the language that launched the PC revolution. What will Javascript bring?