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Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing
Coding was a preserve of elites, until BASIC hit the streets.
(As the software engineer Erin Spiceland puts it, coding is “telling rocks what to think.”) If you were, as I was, marinated in Tolkien and other florid high-fantasy novels, there was a deep romance in the idea that everyday language could affect reality. People shared code freely: If a friend wrote a cool blackjack game, we’d all make a copy—by hand, like scribes in medieval monasteries—and run it ourselves. I spent one afternoon painstakingly typing hundreds of lines of Conway’s “Game of Life” that I’d found in an issue, then watched, mesmerized, as an artificial organism bloomed onscreen.
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