This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

BASIC and Old Languages

BASIC, invented or defined or first implemented in 1964 at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, is far older than C.

BASIC has grown a number of extremely closely related dialects, and is still in very wide use today. It doesn't have the distinction of having "the most application programs" or the most widespread variety of hosted operating systems (i.e., Unix/Linux/etc.)
written in the language, as compared to C, but it isn't by any means a dead language either.

It isn't at all clear what the "oldest, currently still-in-use, programming language" is. But it clearly is *not* C. Fortran dates from a decade before BASIC and is still very much in everyday use for technical computing. Lisp (and its successors) was implemented first at MIT in the time-frame
between Fortran and Basic and is very much in use in both academia and industry, and also has a very robust research publishing community.

[IKB 184 updated to reflect that C is just one of many old programming languages still in wide-spread use. AT]

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