GW-BASIC isn't dead yet. A Microsoft product of the early 1980s, GW-BASIC and its direct successors were loaded into more personal computers than any other programming language in history. GW-BASIC was a line-numbered, unstructured, loosely procedural high-level programming environment that immediately set you down in the thick of it: confronted with an Ok prompt, cursor blinking, the language interpreter made no bones about its high-level expectations of you. Algorithms, some just as complex as anything being coded these days, could be fashioned in GW-BASIC; program in the language now, and you'll experience a particular type of joy that attends to a successful solution of a new-world coding problem that, samurai-like, you are somehow able to slay using an old-world unstructured language. Mark Jones Lorenzo first wrote about GW-BASIC in Not Ok, arguing that reports of its death were greatly exaggerated--and proving it by offering a cookbook of engaging and cutting-edge algorithmic
