"David H. Burns" <dhb### [at] cherokeetelnet> wrote:
> The fact is (that is to say, "my opinion is") that those who talked that
> way rightly perceived it as a
> threat to their elite status and so its development was squelched.

That may have been part of the deal. I guess, however, it was partly justified
by a surge of hobbyist spaghetti-code programmers claiming to know how to
program, but being unaware that software development also includes maintenance
(i.e. bug fixing and later modifications) and teamwork, and that their
spaghetti-code was often very ill-suited to those parts of the job.

I don't think the development was actively squelched. It just slowly died out as
soon as BASIC ceased to be actively pushed by a thriving home computer industry.
That's the primary reason BASIC became so popular in the first place: You got it
for free with every home computer brand in the whole wide world. Not only that:
It even constituted the standard user interface, so without typing a BASIC
command you usually couldn't even start any other software.

For quite a while you didn't get any programming language for free with
IMB-compatible PCs when they replaced home computers as the private man's
computer. (Well, you had batch files, but I guess we agree that they don't
really count.) The reason for this is highly unlikely to have anything to do
with attempts to squelch the language - much to the contrary, Microsoft instead
probably hoped to make money out of it. And in the beginning they did.

I think it was not before DOS 5.0 that Microsoft started to bundle BASIC again
with DOS, possibly in an attempt to revive the dwindling popularity of BASIC;
still it was not as omnipresent as it had been in the home computer era, so it
didn't manage to attract as many new enthusiasts.

Visual Basic, too, might not have gained such popularity, had it not been chosen
as the scripting language for the most popular office package. And who would be
talking about JavaScript, had it not been the first scripting language to be
integrated in a web browser?

(And who would ever have heard of POV-Ray SDL if it wasn't bundled with the
POV-Ray raytracer? ;))


So you see, bundling is a very strong tool for promoting a software language.
I'd say BASIC wasn't quenched, but instead had been hyped before, both
ideologically ("the first language everyone can learn") and financially (dead
giveway with every computer), and has just been allowed to settle to its
"natural" level of importance.

With "natural" level meaning that BASIC is (aside from VB/VBA) not a mainstream
language anymore, but all the while far from dead either - and may even have
what you're looking for. Just had a quick browse though a few Wikipedia pages,
to stumble across this paragraph:

------------
FreeBASIC has a built-in 2D, software graphics library to be QuickBASIC
compatible, which provides the user with simple graphics primitives (such as
rectangles, lines, and circles), blitting, and additional features which
weren't present in QuickBASIC's graphical library. The library itself is not OS
dependent, so code is portable across platforms with the library.
------------
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBASIC)

(Yes, you *definitely* should spend more time with Wikipedia - she's your friend
;))

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