Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.


ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 - A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004-05

Alan Kay Quotes

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic...

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic...

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic...

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic...