On November 12th Thomas Kurtz, the co-inventor (along with John Kemeny who passed in 1992) of the BASIC programming language died at the age of 96. It would be difficult to overstate the impact he had on computing. BASIC made it possible for so many people (myself included) to begin their journey into programming.
In the late 1970s I became interested in learning to code. My father, who was an electrical engineer and coded in Fortran at work, brought home a book that taught the basics of programming. Written and published by Apple, it appeared to only cover 6502 Assembler, the chip that was in the Apple II. Just a few pages in my eyes began to glaze over and I started to wonder if programming was really for me. Fortunately, I flipped the book over to find it was actually two books in one. From the other side it was a book about AppleSoft BASIC. As I looked at the language, it made immediate sense to me. Assembler was too low level and not a great first language but BASIC was ideal for this purpose. I learned enough to get going and my life was forever changed.
Programming has evolved a lot since then but we still design Xojo with the same principle that Thomas and John espoused with their original version of BASIC: that programming should be accessible to anyone with an interest. We have many users whose first experience with programming was with Xojo just as mine was with BASIC. In our own way, Xojo is continuing what Thomas and John began. Today more people have the ability to learn programming than ever before. Thomas and John both were true pioneers that contributed significantly to making that happen.
Geoff Perlman is the Founder and CEO of Xojo. When he’s not leading the Xojo team he can be found playing drums in Austin, Texas and spending time with his family.