Microsoft developer Vijaye Raji spends his free time working on software designed to help beginners learn the principles behind Basic, programming’s original language.
By John Van Vleet
August 5, 2008
The way Vijaye Raji sees it, future developers need to get back to the Basics—literally and figuratively. That explains why Raji, a senior software developer, has spent a large chunk of his free nights and weekends over the past year working on a pet project he calls Small Basic, a language variant of Basic designed to teach beginners the principles behind programming.
“If you take a quick poll around Microsoft of all the developers, and you ask them what they started programming with, it’s usually some kind of variant of Basic,” said Raji. “When MS-DOS came around, they introduced QBasic, and it became very popular. Everybody started programming in QBasic. The interesting thing is that everybody who is a super developer right now at Microsoft started with the same humble beginnings: Basic.”
