History of programming languages: from BASIC to Visual Basic

DONKEY.BAS. Included in the IBM PC package in 1981. Co-author - Bill Gates

The name BASIC appeared as an abbreviation of "Beginner's All — purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", which literally means "a multi-purpose language of symbolic commands for beginners." This is the case when the literal translation clearly conveyed the essence. The key feature of BASIC was not only its simplicity, but also the ability to find a solution in the mode of dialogue with a computer.

For many computers of the late 60s, BASIC was positioned as the only high-level general-purpose programming language, and over time this led to the emergence of various modifications of it. The turning point in language development was the emergence of Visual Basic.
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Prehistory

In the mid-50s, the role of programming in machine codes began to decrease. Higher level languages ​​appeared - Fortran, Algol, Cobol and so on.

The first of these and one of the most common was Fortran (FORTRAN, from FORmula TRANslator - formula translator), developed by a group of IBM programmers in 1954 (the first version). This language was focused on scientific and technical calculations of a mathematical nature.

The name of the language Algol (ALGOrithmic Language), the first version of which appeared in 1958, underlines the fact that it is intended for writing algorithms. Thanks to its clear logical structure, Algol has become a standard means of recording algorithms in the scientific and technical literature.

At that time, subject orientation was characteristic of high level programming languages. In addition, these languages ​​were too difficult for novice developers, especially if they were not engineers. Therefore, it is natural that with time a programming language for “mere mortals” appeared.

BASIC. Just BASIC

The idea of ​​creating this programming language is associated with a well-known story about an English missionary.

In the XIX century, one English missionary who was looking for an opportunity to facilitate and simplify contact with the natives came up with a brilliant idea - to isolate from the English language the simplest part of it, with virtually no grammar, and containing about 300 of the most common words. This shortened subtype of English was called BASIC ENGLISH, and as practice showed, it really turned out to be very easy to learn, and soon gained popularity not only among the native population, but also among immigrants for whom English was not their first language.

One hundred years later, a similar way was chosen by the staff of the mathematics department of Dartmouth College. They decided to facilitate the interaction between a computer and a non-professional user through a “simplified” programming language.

In 1964, Thomas Kurtz and John Kameny created a specialized programming language that consisted of simple words of the English language. The new language was called BASIC.



They used it to teach students programming skills. The language was so simple and understandable that after a while it began to be applied in other educational institutions.



Fortran II and Algol 60 had a major impact on BASIC. In addition, the developers implemented in it the mechanisms of work for systems with time-sharing mode, as well as text processing and matrix arithmetic. The language compiler was originally written for the GE-265 mainframe.

Flourishing

In the 70s, more compact computers (PCs) appeared. This circumstance was successfully used by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft.



They have created a new version of BASIC for the first Altair computers (MITS Altair), capable of operating in 4KB of RAM. Over time, this version has become one of the most popular programming languages ​​in the world.


Altair

The period of the greatest prosperity and development of the original BASIC can be considered the end of the 1970s - the first half of the 1980s. His versions appeared on other platforms, and soon began to disperse millions of copies with all sorts of changes and modifications. One of the most popular versions was Applesoft BASIC, which became the standard language on the Apple II.

Applesoft BASIC was written by Microsoft as a replacement for Integer BASIC, which was used in the very first Apple II model and had very limited capabilities. Applesoft BASIC was flashed into the ROM of all Apple II models, starting with Apple II +, and all Apple II clones. Also, an earlier and trimmed version of Applesoft BASIC was available on cassettes for the very first Apple II model.



For the CP / M operating system, the BASIC-80 dialect was created, which for a long time determined the development of the language.

When the first personal computers of the IBM PC appeared, it became the standard in programming, but in the form of GW-Basic.

In the mid-1980s, BASIC became the main language in complex models of programmable calculators, which, by that time, had reached the capacity to allow the use of a full-fledged high-level language. BASIC was built into the Soviet calculator "Electronics MK-85" and all its later models.



Also in 1985, IDE Quick Basic appeared - an integrated development environment and compiler for the BASIC programming language, developed by Microsoft from 1985 to 1988. There were versions for DOS and Mac OS. The BASIC dialect used was based on the improved GW-BASIC dialect: support for custom types, structures for structured programming was implemented, and support for graphic and disk operations was greatly expanded.

Robert "Bob" Zale in 1987, based on his many years of development BASIC / Z created Turbo Basic, and then sold it to Borland. Infoworld magazine called it one of the most significant products of the year.



Unlike most implementations of BASIC from that period, Turbo Basic was the complete compiler that generated native MS-DOS code.

Despite the huge number of versions of the BASIC language, while developing a new version of the language, compatibility with previous versions was always maintained: it was possible to work with the program written for earlier versions completely (sometimes with minor changes) in subsequent versions of this language.

Second Life

In the early 90s, the Microsoft Windows operating system appeared with a new graphical user interface.

To create a simple program, developers had to write several pages of code: prescribe large blocks of code for menus and windows, fonts, clear memory, “draw” buttons, etc. However, the advantages of the new interface were quite strong, and Windows had real prospects to become popular everywhere.

Microsoft realized that it was necessary to somehow make life easier for developers. Therefore, the company launched several parallel projects to create a new programming language and development environment for Windows.



BASIC received a second life when Microsoft released Visual Basic. It became a logical conclusion to the evolution of the language and, despite the preservation of the usual keywords, was closer in structure to the Pascal than in the original BASIC.

In 1991, the first version of the new Microsoft Visual Basic IDE appeared. However, at that moment Microsoft rather modestly assessed the capabilities of this system, orienting it, nevertheless, to the category of beginner and non-professional programmers.

Of course, this was only the first step, as Bill Gates’s company planned to strengthen Windows’s position in the market. And this would be very difficult to do, leaving commercial developers without effective means of creating applications for MS Windows.

The programming system created by the developers of Visual Basic, allowed to abstract from the internal structure of Windows. Menus, windows, lists, buttons, text input fields and other elements of the Windows interface were added to the program using simple drag & drop operations, and most of the code for their initialization and configuration was generated automatically.

VB-programmers could create their first program just a few minutes after they started learning this language. Moreover, Visual Basic allowed developers to create new GUI elements that could also be used in programs along with standard ones.

Despite the fact that many C-developers did not take seriously Microsoft's attempts to make a simple and understandable tool for developing Windows-based programs, the rest of the IT community had high hopes for Visual Basic.

In 1994, the company released Visual Basic for Applications. It was at this time, after the inclusion of VBA in Microsoft Office, Basic became one of the main programming standards for Windows.

Originally conceived as a toy, Microsoft’s Visual Basic from Microsoft incredibly quickly conquered the programming world. Its popularity is due to two reasons: relative simplicity and productivity.

Programs on VB worked slower than their counterparts in C / C ++, but still they are fast enough for many business purposes and require much less development time. The forms were the very effort-saving abstraction offered by VB to Windows programmers.

IDE VB allowed to develop windows graphically by dragging controls, such as buttons and lists, from the toolbar to the form. Having obtained a satisfactory appearance of the form, it was possible to go to the code part and write event handlers for each form control.

Application development in VB thus consisted of creating several forms that interacted with each other.

From the point of view of writing code, the important difference from C ++ was the rejection of pointers. So decided to Bill Gates, even during the development of the first versions of Microsoft BASIC. Although pointers are useful because they allow direct access to memory at any address, their use is fraught with errors if they are used carelessly. And since the language was originally created for "mere mortals", this decision looks quite justified.

Major Visual Basic Versions

In the first version (1991), Alan Cooper implemented the principle of communication language and graphical interface.

Starting with the third version (1993), VB has added support for MS Access.

Visual Basic 4.0 (1995) is a version in which the ability to create both 32-bit and 16-bit Windows-based applications appeared. In addition, classes have been added to the language.

Starting with VB 5.0 (1997), it became possible to develop your own COM components. In addition, a new virtual machine has appeared, implemented in the MSVBVM50.DLL dynamic library. The VB compiler used multi-pass mode for translation, but ultimately relied on the Microsoft C ++ compiler to get the output machine code after compiling into an intermediate language. The use of the runtime library and the C ++ internal interface was the starting point for the formation of the .NET technology.

VB version 6 is already a powerful language that can be used to create distributed applications using COM components and Microsoft Transaction Server. Microsoft proposed a three-tier approach for client-server architectures, in which thin user interfaces interacted with remote VB components to retrieve data from a database or from another machine.

Moreover, VB6 (1998) could be used to create Active-X controls that work with Internet Explorer.



In 2002, the first release of Visual Basic .NET appeared. Since then, backward compatibility with the classic version of Visual Basic has been broken.

Since 2005, Visual Basic is part of the IDE Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. To this day, the language develops with the IDE - up to the current version - MS Visual Studio 2015.

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The Basic and Visual Basic languages ​​have gone a long way and have undergone significant, one might say, irreversible changes. Little remained of their original simplicity. As a result, VB has become a “normal” high-level object-oriented programming language.