Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC!!

[Edvard]

Well, a couple days late, but we'll not get into particulars... 
I cut my computing teeth on Apple BASIC between '82 and '86, didn't touch computers from then until 2000, but I still remember those days sitting in the library typing in Beagle Bros. one-liners at an Apple ][e with fondness, and I still say "string" in my head when I have to use '$' in an environment variable or regex. 

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal
... Kemeny and Kurtz decided to create something so straightforward that it almost didn’t involve memorization at all. “We wanted the syntax of the language to consist of common words, and to have those words have a more-or-less obvious meaning,” says Kurtz. “It is a slight stretch, but isn’t it simpler to use HELLO and GOODBYE in place of LOGON and LOGOFF?”

http://time.com/69316/basic/

[TaoPhoenix]

Or something. I made about eight programs on a C128 and never programmed again. ; )

These days I am an accountant jack of all trades UI specialist, or something.

[40hz]

The first program I wrote (for someone else) that ran on a bona fide 'personal' computer (a tricked-out TRS-80 Model III w/LDOS) was written in BASIC. TRS-80 Disk Basic IIRC. LDOS + disk Basic was considered a fairly powerful OS/language combo at the time.

Other than picking up a smattering of C++ more recently, I haven't done anything resembling real programming in a very very long time.