Someone posted this link in the VCF, which got me thinking...
http://softwareengineering.stackexchang ... d-if-so-ho
I was a dab hand at BASIC in the day (1982-1988 ). At that time it was generally sneered upon by those in the computer science community for being unstructured, inelegant and allowing spaghetti code...a "toy" language. There is some truth in this, but I can't help thinking there was snobbery also. There were many variants of BASIC but even with 8k BASIC you could write understandable code. It was a matter of being disciplined and commenting extensively (where RAM allowed it). Once we moved past the basic (8-12k) BASICs into GW-BASIC and QuickBASIC, structural elements were there (e.g. WHILE...WEND etc.). You also had enough RAM to comment well.
I wrote some highly useful in-house programs for my work that did the job exactly as they should, and weren't hard to maintain. It was an Everyman's language. BASIC I salute you!
What's your experience with BASIC?