Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

Microsoft open-sourced the MS-BASIC language. Bill Gates would never have seen this coming back in the day. MS-BASIC 1.1 was many developers' first language. In 1976, they rebranded Altair BASIC to ...

Why it matters: There's a good chance you cut your coding teeth on BASIC if you took a computer class back in the 20th century. The Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code celebrated its 60th ...

Back in the CPM/CPM86 days a popular business basic was CBasic/Cbasic86. I did a lot of work for small businesses in those basics. These days I use VB for Windows/SQL work when necessary. Commodore 64 ...

Though not nearly as popular; VB.NET is as functional a development language as C# (indeed, both compile to the same intermediate code and there are only a handful of functional differences, such as ...