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.”

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Hoop has excellent taste in music

Hey, Hoop. So, what’s changed since we spoke last summer?
Last year was all about building the base for the Zune service. This year, we’re working on building cool stuff on top of that infrastructure. Last year we were much more hard pressed for schedule, trying to make the release date for Zune 2.0.

Summer and early fall of 2007 I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life — harder than college, even harder than when I had two jobs simultaneously.
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