BASIC

[Notes: Include several paragraphs emphasizing that BASIC was designed with beginner's in mind. Here's some draft text]

The "B" in BASIC was not simply a rhetorical move. The creators of BASIC sincerely wanted a language that novices could start using within minutes of study. This intent is clearly reflected in some of BASIC's original design principles. BASIC should, Kemeny and Kurtz decided, "give error messages that were clear and friendly" and provide default options that satisfy most users' needs (9). "If the expert needs something fancier," Kemeny and Kurtz declared, "let the expert do the extra work!" (11). Furthermore, BASIC was intended truly as a high level language, meaning programmers would need little knowledge of the actual processes underlying the code--the low level machine instructions. BASIC's designers were adamant about making everything except BASIC itself transparent to the programmer: "No understanding of the hardware should be necessary" and "It should shield the user from the operating system" were two initial goals of BASIC, in fact (9).

Ironically, 10 PRINT highlights the failure of this transparency. The code makes little sense unless one knows the Commodore 64's idiosyncratic character set. There is no shielding the user from the operating system in 10 PRINT. Indeed, there is no escaping it.