Python: The New Basic?

Back in the 90s, BASIC was the programming language you start with in order to learn programming. BASIC actually meant something: Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and the “B” in BASIC explicitly tells us that.

Of course, it’s not the most powerful and most capable when you compare it to Assembly, C, C++ but it was enough for anyone to write good programs, and even build a game with it. Very early incarnations of BASIC had line numbers and it is used to redirect the flow from one point to another via the GOTO command.

Here’s a very simple BASIC program that infinitely prints a “HELLO” text on the screen:

10 CLS
20 PRINT "HELLO"
30 GOTO 20

Of course, if you ran this it would freeze your machine 🙂

The reason why BASIC is that popular is because writing code in it felt like writing plain English words to another person. The keywords it used were very “obvious” and it’s structure is easy to follow. There were more advanced form of basic in the form of QBasic (Microsoft) and Turbo Basic (Borland), and the most recent iteration is Visual Basic (which I’d write about in the future).

With so many programming languages nowadays, it’s often asked “what programming language should I learn first?”

My answer is Python. if I’m going to teach someone the concepts of programming, I’d teach them through Python. To me, it has the lowest barrier to learning programming as it has very few and simple rules in writing codes. The only major thing they have to be aware of initially are indentation and (text) casing.

Most (if not all) programming tutorials start with a “hello, world” program — which is essentially the entry-level to that programming language. And here’s how it’s done in Python:

print "hello, world!"    # if you're using Python 2*

print("hello, world!")   # if you're using Python 3*

Notice how simple it is? In other programming language, you’ll have to learn a lot of things just to output something as simple as that. Notice also how it looks like a BASIC code? And that’s exactly why I think Python is the new/modern BASIC.

I’ll write more about Python and Visual Basic in this blog so make sure you bookmark this site and go back to check. 🙂