Basic and Pascal

When I grew up there was a rivalry between Basic and Pascal programmers. Most people who started programming in the 1990s either started with Basic or Pascal. Those who used Pascal often conceived themselves as being superior to Basic programmers. That was mainly because it was so easy to program in Basic. You did not even have to define variables. Thus you were not forced to keep the number of variables low and your program might become bloated - bad coding style. However, some of the resentments were based on misconceptions. For instance, Pascal programmers who had no experience with then modern Basic dialects thought Basic meant that you had to use line numbers and write spaghetti code. That was not the case with dialects such as Quick Basic - you did not have to use line numbers and there were control structures such as do/loop which made the usage of the goto statement obsolete.

I was one of those who started with Basic and I do not regret it. In fact I have decided that I will use Basic in my sparetime again since it is far easier to get something to work in Basic than in any other programming language. Professionally I use C#, and I like this language, but Basic by far beats it as regards to its easiness of use.