I originally learned to program with BASIC. When I was designing D, I thought back to how easy and natural string manipulation was in BASIC, and what a festering swamp of bugs it was in C.

Having strings as easy and correct in D was a major priority, and history has shown that this was a success.

P.S. Whenever I review C code, I first look at the string manipulation. The probability of finding a bug in it is near certainty. Question for the people who disagree - without looking it up, how does strncpy() deal with 0 termination?

Thank you, Thomas Kurtz!

96! Lived a full life. RIP.

I wrote a lot of QBASIC. 1986-90ish, old Bangalore. I was 12. There was no Mac or Unix or Windows in India those days. Only MSDOS. I had a 386 box. I would insert a 5.25" floppy, boot into command.com, then CD to GWBASIC.EXE and enter GWBASIC. Wrote a lot of GWBASIC to annoy friends and family by emitting high pitched sounds. You could do SOUND 2000+i, j, where i is the frequency & j was duration. You could even control volume from BASIC. I would put that in a WHILE WEND loop and make it go crazy. People didn't know how to turn it off once it got going. Then suddenly one day DOS went away and we had something called MS WINDOWS 3.1 and you had to insert a white round ball into a mouse and click on icons, no more command line, and even GWBASIC was gone, they put QBASIC and it came with snake program. Then I got into the graphics craze. We had a CGA & so I did SCREEN 2, then used LINE and CIRCLE to my heart's content. Few colors only. Then we upgraded to VGA monitor then SCREEN 12 was a full 640x480, I wrote QBASIC to make annoying sounds while drawing. It was an amazing childhood, thanks to this miracle language. BASIC led to something called CLIPPER, then I did some FOXPRO, got paid actual rupees to write an inventory control system in FOXPRO, then MFC, Borland C++...all the way upto today.

But it all started with BASIC. Amazing language. Thank you, Dr. Kurtz.

The legacy of BASIC is outstanding. I learned BASIC because there's a BASIC ROM in the hardware of the Atari 800XL that I was fortunate to have access to when I was very young. The language was easy enough to pick up from sample programs in the back of its instruction manual, even for a kid who didn't know anyone who knew anything about computers.

I never met Kurtz personally but I owe a lot to that language for the access to virtually limitless creativity that computers and computer programming have offered. My life would be very different if I didn't have the opportunity that the language provided, especially because it is both approachable and (somewhat) capable.

Sure, it's not the best language for large scale or complex efforts, but it was enough for a child to be able to build text adventures and blit pixels to the screen (it would be another decade before I found out that INT was about interrupt, not integers). Then, as a teenager fooling around with writing games for the class calculators in TI-BASIC, even though that's a bit farther down the language family tree, that also had a positive impact on my growth as a developer and it was the first of many "same but different" experiences that you so often get in the realm of programming. I was also quite fortunate, that launched an early game dev career for me.

To be honest, I wouldn't have recognized the name Thomas E. Kurtz before yesterday, but my mind will light up with dozens of fond memories at the mention of BASIC. I'm not surprised that he was so involved in instructional computing (but I am surprised I never looked into the author(s) of BASIC before, a little ashamed, but I'll remember his name). I actually still have the same Atari 800XL from my childhood and I'll think of him when I see it now.

I interviewed Thomas Kurtz at his home in 2010 for my dissertation on the "computer utility" vision of the 60s and 70s (which foresaw a world of large computer utilities that would function like AT&T or an electrical power company, but for electronic services).

He was long-since retired, but still living in the hills of New Hampshire near Dartmouth. Unfortunately I can't find my interview notes right now, but I do remember that he was very kind and welcoming. What he and John Kemeny did at Dartmouth was truly remarkable. For them the technology (time-sharing and BASIC) was a means to an end of educating and empowering students, and ultimately society as a whole.

I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1976, if I remember correctly! I was 15 years old, and my dad and I went to a trade fair. There was an IBM booth there. A man invited me to try a moon-landing game. It was on an IBM 5100. I asked my dad what happened to the characters that scrolled off the top of the screen! Since he wasn’t at all into tech, he asked the IBM engineer to explain it to me. And that’s when I knew it was my thing! I wrote my first few lines of BASIC right there! The following year, there was a Hewlett Packard booth where an HP-9825A (I think?) was drawing Lissajous figures on a plotter. I was mesmerized! The next year, I start working during my holidays to buy an HP-25. The year after that, I got a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II and started programming it in BASIC. I didn’t know much at the time. I even bought the Editor/Assembler, thinking it would increase the screen resolution! After that, it was an Atari ST (with Megamax C and GFA BASIC), and then PCs with a whole variety of languages ...

What has always impressed me is that some people managed, in just a few days, weeks, or months, to invent languages used by millions of people, sometimes for their entire lives! What an impact!

Mr. Kurtz, you may not have created the best language, but what you did create brought joy and inspired a whole generation of young programmers. Joy that, I feel, has somewhat faded today. Unless you’re coding in Rust!

Thank you, Mr. Kurtz!