I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

A.I. tools from Microsoft and other companies are helping write code, placing software engineers at the forefront of the technology’s potential to disrupt the work force. By Steve Lohr Steve Lohr has ...