BASIC

As the name implies, BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a very simple language developed with beginning programmers in mind. BASIC was developed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth. Since then, many variations of the language have been developed, the most popular of which is certainly Microsoft's Visual Basic language. To this day, however, BASIC remains a language for beginning programmers and not many large, complicated applications are developed for it. The market for ActiveX components however, many of which are written in Visual Basic, remains very strong.