Thomas E. Kurtz has died

Like most of the programmers of my generation, BASIC was the first language I learned. BASIC was so pervasive in the 80s and 90s. Nearly every computer came with a copy of some flavor of BASIC. Even my 6th grade math textbook had an appendix with educational math games in the form of BASIC source code listings.

So long and thanks for all the fish Dr. Kurtz!

Why "thanks.*fish"? (regex, chill ;)

I know it is a saying, have read it before, but would prefer to hear the explanation from a person rather than Google.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

To add to this, it is revealed in Hitchhikers that dolphins are super intelligent extraterrestrials. "So long and thanks for all the fish" is the superintelligent dolphins farewell to the last of earth/hummanity.

I ended up using multiple versions of basic because the various boot discs we had came with different versions. Off the top of my head I remember BASIC, BASICA, and QBASIC. Not that I remember the differences between the flavors any more.

Heard of the book, but have not read it, 41 times so far. Next time ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)

that's rather finny :)

or fishy.

if they are extraterrestrials, wtf are they doing on terra, or rather, in / under oceania?

/jk

also, no way they can be superintelligent, if they came here, even once. bcoz, u no, shipz propellers, orcas, etc.

I'd say Douglas Adams novels are full of superintelligent and/or superpowered entities that don't always think things through properly. There's a serious Murphy's Law flavor to his scenarios, even if you're the President of the Galaxy or the Man Who Rules the Universe or a planetary engineer or the most intelligent robot ever built or whatever. You're still going to trip and fall, or experience unrequited love, or get stranded on a boring planet, or have an embarrassing misunderstanding, or concoct a wacky scheme that goes wrong somehow.

I thought it was the mice that were the super intelligent extraterrestrials?

The mice were the mechanism by which the hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings observed their experiment. The experiment being "what is the Ultimate Question?" by running a 10 million year simulation.

I believe we were only the 3rd most intelligent on Earth, or something like that? Both dolphins and mouse being more intelligent.

Given human events, he was not wrong in that conclusion. (If we even consider ourselves super intelligent)

astute - you and gp both.