Thank you, Basic: developers remember 50 years of creative coding

It is 50 years since Prof John Kemeny and a student created the programming language Basic at 4am in a New Hampshire basement at Dartmouth College. Their aim was to design a tool that would improve computer literacy in education, a simple, accessible language that anyone could learn quickly and easily.

Basic became a mainstay of the programming landscape. Here, designers and programmers explain what it taught them and why it still matters.