My Programming Journey Began With BASIC
While reading my daily email from TLDR Web Dev, one article in particular caught my eye: 10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages by Hillel Wayne. If you’re into the history of technology, this article is a great read—it explores languages that shaped the way we program today, even if they’re no longer in wide use. At number 4 on the list was BASIC, and that stopped me in my tracks.
Where It All Started
BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was my first step into a world that, at the time, I couldn’t even imagine.
I still remember sitting in front of a glowing VGA monitor, typing something like this:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
and feeling like a wizard when the screen erupted into a never-ending flood of “HELLO WORLD”. For a kid with a curious mind, that was pure magic. It wasn’t just a computer running lines of text—it was a machine doing what I told it to do. That simple loop lit a spark that’s been burning ever since.
The Journey From There
From BASIC I wandered into CA-Clipper, Pascal, Delphi, and Visual Basic. Then the internet caught on, and I found myself building websites just as .NET came along. These languages were my stepping stones—each one a little more powerful, a little more complex.
Over the years I found myself building bigger things, solving harder problems, and eventually turning this curiosity into a career. But even today, decades later, I can still trace it all back to those first 10 lines of BASIC.
Lifelong Learning in Tech
One of the things I love most about technology is that it never stands still. There’s always a new language, a new tool, a new way of thinking. And for someone like me, that’s the best part.
The TLDR article was a reminder that the languages we leave behind are never really gone—they leave fingerprints everywhere. Every new skill I pick up still carries a piece of BASIC with it: the joy of experimentation, the patience to figure things out, and the thrill of making something from nothing.
After 30+ years, I still get that same feeling when I write code. And I hope I never lose it.
What about you? What was your first programming language? I’d love to hear your story in the comments below.