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Comment by wild_egg | Hacker News Reader

Why is BASIC a weird choice? It wasn't really a choice at all. All the computers in my school ran it until I was 8 or 9 and the school board could afford to upgrade to Windows machines.

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Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP. BASIC wouldn't have been included in XP or 2000, and depending on what exactly they were using, it may have been easier to use something with more features. QBasic for example wouldn't have syntax highlighting. Simple programs in languages like python or perl can be used to teach the same concepts, with fairly similar syntax, and would have been more applicable to software people were actually writing at the time.

When I was in high school we used VB6 and VB.NET on Windows XP. Does Visual Basic not count?

I don't have much experience with Visual BASIC, but it seems like it was (and still is) a fairly effective and usable rapid development environment.

> Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP.

Weird. I distinctly remember Commodore 64, DOS, and Windows 3.1 at school. Kind of hard to use Windows 95 before 1995, but I am pretty sure I had a Windows 98 SE machine at home when my school finally got Windows 95.

BASIC ran on graphing calculators as well.

If you define a millennial as someone born from 1982-1996, the majority of those kids by the time the had a computer lab (say by the time they were in middle school) would have been too old for BASIC. You are talking 92-06, Windows 95 took over the majority market share by the end of '96, and you are forgetting a whole lot of schools had Apples being pumped in, so a lot less access to BASIC. Unless you were in a programming adjacent class, the majority of millennials weren't learning basic. Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.

In India, I think we still had BASIC taught in schools and private coaching centers in 95-98.

> Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.

Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.

BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.

It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.

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