The next day I and my nerdy friends raided the library. We found 101 Games in BASIC, a book with code for making versions of checkers, Battleship, and the like. It was our Necronomicon.

Their journey to create a more user-friendly language began in 1956 with Dartmouth Simplified Code (DARSIMSCO), followed by the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment (DOPE).

The pioneer of structured programming, Edsger Dijkstra, said in 1975, for example, that it was almost impossible to teach good programming to students who had previously come into contact with BASIC.