I was playing with the version of QBASIC that comes with MS-DOS 5 last weekend, and it was a lot of fun. Part of the reason may have been nostalgia. (I deliberately choose that version since that it what my first IBM compatible had.) I think a more important reason was the simplicity.
Take graphics. You aren't searching for a library to handle graphics since it is built into the language. Initializing graphics takes one line, so you aren't creating a separate function to handle an over-complicated process. Heck, there's less documenting of what you're doing since the language's documentation usually does that better than you can. You simply dive into the next task, which is always doing something more interesting than over-engineering a project that you originally set out on to have some fun.
I understand why complexity has grown in modern development tools and how much of a hindrance simplicity would be for professional software development, but it would be nice if there were more modern options out there to facilitate programming for pleasure. (I don't really count languages designed for education, since they're usually designed to deliver a curriculum. Something like Arduino would be a good example, since it is designed to facilitate creative projects.)
I'm not vouching for anything in particular, but there are "8 bit"-type machines running BASIC which are very accessible like this. Here's one which the 8 Bit Guy reviewed recently (it's actually a 32 bit ARM part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4
I have the Gigatron which is a bit similar but you have to solder it together.
Based on pg's request[1] I've been working on a Basic and while I started with Classic Basic as I've been improving by dropping line numbers and currently adding labels I think I've reinvented QBasic!
I made my first every game using qbasic when I was 11, and learned just by RTFM, no-one to teach me, no internet tutorials because no internet. Such a simple language and great way to start programming. I think we're missing something like this. Scratch is too easy. Javascript needs too much setup.
In case you wondered, it was called "Dancing Dobbins" and was a horse racing and betting game. It generated Random Horse names and odds, you placed bets and the horses ran across the screen, each drawn very jaggedly with vector lines.
I just kept adding to it and adding to it and it eventually got quite strange, some of the horses would randomly go mad and start attacking adjacent lanes. I believe there was alien abduction during some races.
Ah good memories. Once BASIC got rid of requiring line numbers and supporting function calls it really wasn't too bad of a language from what I remember.
I started out with TRS-80 BASIC, then assembly language on the TRS-80, then using BASIC on the PC, and then assembly language on the PC. After that was C.
But I still have fond memories of BASIC as my first programming language.
Basic was also my first introducing to programming. And nowadays i still think its probably the best language to teach programming.
I don't think it should be used to create professional programs, as its pretty limited for that, and doing modifications to turn into an able environment for this would only create a creepy language, inflicting misery in people that have to maintain large codebases of such a thing.
What i really want to point out, is that, if you look into Basic for what it shines, i think things like "GOTO line" are very good, because it teach you how the computer works under the hood (the native code will point to memory, stack, registers, program offset, call hard defined OS syscalls, etc..)
You could deal with the soft/logical and hard/physical paradigms at the same time, understanding that the logical ones are built through abstractions over the hard ones.
Later if you decide to code, than you can choose if you want/can be spoiled and use more abstract and easy languages like Python or Javascript, but also with a good understanding/intuition of how things work under the hood.
And all of this can be done in a easy way, like with jumps to a giving code position. (It alsos teach you to think over indirections, why some things are good or bad, and have the power to teach you to move on to better things, but only after you really know whats going on).
The basic GOTOS and other techniques might be bad for coding in real life, but im against taking them out of languages that can serve to teach programming to kids, and even creating more of this sort of instructions, that teach how to reason about code, where you can start with "bad practices" but that are pretty easy to use at a beginning level.
Stupid little things like taking graphics and sound for granted and not having to import libraries, using things like 'CIRCLE' or 'BEEP' or 'GOTO 10' is what your eight year old self would think its pretty cool and would run to your parents to show them with confidence in yourself.
I followed essentially the same path (though I ended up working in 4GLs in the late 80s). I also have fond memories of my time working (playing!) in BASIC.
That said, I like the options we have today for writing software that needs to be maintained :)
Related trivia: While in high school I somehow got on the mailing list for the [RadioShack-related] Allied Industrial catalog. The one catalog I remember getting featured the TRS-80 a month or two before there was any retail announcement by Radio Shack. Just something I've remembered since.
I started out with Basic on a C64, patiently entering the programs from the back of the manual.
In 9th grade we had to choose a company for work practice. I chose Oki, since I figured printers were close enough to computers to be interesting.
Turns out the task was burning EPROMs, basically pushing a button once every five minutes. Luckily, the computer controlling the burner had QBasic installed. I remember some of the employees looking over my shoulder and oohing and aahing while I was making time pass by writing code.
Fast forward 30 years and here we are. Haven't touched Basic since then but I've written substantial amounts of code in most languages out there. Even created ten or so of my own.
As much as I respect the guy; when it comes to Basic, Dijkstra was wrong. You have to start somewhere.
I think if it was up to Dijkstra you'd never have been allowed to program. Instead you'd be still pushing the button and I'd probably be attaching the label.
Also I feel the pain, at one time I was the guy hitting enter every couple of minutes, then applying a label and putting the programmed eeprom in the tube.
If you're looking for "basic for the modern era", also check out freebasic and appgamekit studio, the latter of which is a descendant of darkbasic and the "tier 1" version uses a basic dialect. What made appgamekit better for me than qb64 or freebasic is the runtime debugging. While qb64 and freebasic compile down to native code, appgamekit uses bytecode in a vm, allowing you to use the same step, watch, breakpoint stuff as quickbasic of old.
FreeBASIC is a great descendent of QB, which is suitable for serious, even commercial projects. It has seperate "qb", "fb" and "fblite" dialects. "qb" is very highly compatible with QuickBASIC, while "fb" (the default) is a modern language which has almost all the features of C++98 except multiple inheritance and templates.
I'm co-maintainer of a large RPG creation engine written in FB.
qb64 is great for an intro to programming. I am teaching a young child to program. One of the things I noticed, is that they had difficulty with “if” and “else” blocks. The concept of a block of code that gets executed together versus another block of code just wasn’t intuitive. I changed to basic “if ... goto” and they immediately grasped the code. It was just a labeled linear set of instructions that you just followed starting from the top and going down unless you encountered a “goto”.
Once they get more facile with programming BASIC in this style, I will introduce them to more structured programming.
BASIC is a great intro language for non-programmers cause it is so linear and there are few extraneous noise (for example the parentheses in Python 3)
Funny to see this posted today. I was just listening to an interesting QB64 interview with a developer who recently published his QB64 game to Steam. It's episode 3, here:
This is interesting from a historical perspective, but honestly I'm really glad that the era of Basic is gone. Having had a handful of opportunities to work with legacy Basic code from a wide variety of programmers, it's just a disaster that always leads to unmaintainable garbage. I'm not even sure it is possible to have well architected Basic. Structuring and modularizing code is ridiculously difficult. The very principles of the language somehow lead to pervasive use of globals and gotos. It's neither functional, nor object oriented. Everything ends up as blocks of mutable procedures, tightly coupled, with red flags everywhere.
I'm a very opinionated person about programming languages, and there are plenty of modern language trends that have been bothersome to me. But none of them will be ever as bad as any of the Basic code I have interacted with. I'd rather read and maintain code that went through a unicode-permitted Haskell code golf competition than anything written in Basic.
It was BASIC, and a little bit of QBasic. In a different realm, I also worked with VBA, which wasn't much better, but I think that was more due to programming inexperience. Admittedly didn't have much exposure to Visual Basic or VB.Net.
While I am not much of a fan of the language itself, it is a thing of the past so it is safe to look at its positive points. If you want to consider the negatives, context is an important factor.
One consideration is most BASIC implementations had to run on systems with very limited resources. On early personal computers, that could be 4 kB or 16 kB of RAM. That limited memory had to support both the editor and editor (which needed some RAM to store its state, even if the software itself was in ROM) as well as contain the user's program. Forget about superfluous syntax. Heck, forget about formatting since it was likely tokenized. Earlier versions of BASIC may have run on systems with more resources, but it was designed for education so those resources would have been shared by many users so I don't see the situation being terribly different. Later implementations did take advantage of additional resources, but the language was already on its way out so the impact would be limited.
I've been following a few different BASIC projects over the past few months, it seems that there is a sudden rise of them. Whether nostalgia, or just fun/learning/experimentation is to blame I can't say.
My own BASIC is very simple, but easy to embed/extend:
I sometimes consider extending it with WHILE/WEND, named functions, and similar. But then I remember the constraints are part of what makes it interesting to me.
I still remember the Christmas when I received 48k Spectrum, with my sisters. The tape-deck didn't work, so my sisters lost interest. I worked my way through the (spiral-bound orange) manual, typing BASIC and having a blast.
Later we got a cassette recorder which worked, and I started playing games, and hacking them for infinite lives. I think my initial love/enthusiasm for typing in BASIC programs directly lead to my career.
> Porting those MS-DOS samples into a browser canvas.
I feel obligated to point out that https://copy.sh/v86/ has been able to do this for quite a while now. Of course, having a more native option is an extremely welcome improvement.
Oh man, they taught QBASIC in my first programming class in high school as a freshman in 2001. We had to make a game, we had to learn about loops using WHILE WEND, and now I can show my kids what I used to learn programming because it still works. This is exciting!
As a continuation of the story, the next year I took AP computer science and we learned using Borland C++. the year after that we learn Java 1.4 for AP computer science. Blast from the past, no?
My main Xojo program is a business database front-end for my indie software business. It parses sales notifications and inserts them into an offline database (ie so no customer data is ever kept online). It has a business dashboard for key performance metrics, generates charts for various sales / demographic queries. It also lets me generate serial codes for customers when giving away copies of my apps in promotions. I've been using that for about 20 years.
I also made a cross-platform Twitter-esque client (similar to Tweetbot) to work with the Micro.Blog social network. I had it fully working with Mac, Windows and Linux before I got disillusioned with Micro.Blog and didn't release it.
For internal use, I made a project estimation app for solo/indie developers like myself, that uses Monte Carlo estimation to predict an actual ship date based on the (in)accuracy of your previous task estimates. It had charts of percentage confidence, so you could give an 85% or 95% confidence of shipping a milestone by X date. The tasks & milestones were structured like an outliner and could be moved just with keyboard navigation. It was able to load project files from a discontinued Java program called Mr Schedule that I loved. That Xojo app was cross-platform Windows & Mac too.
RapidQ was my stepping stone from QuickBasic to Windows GUI and server CGI programming. I could not afford VisualBasic and didn’t have a computer with enough disk space to install it. It’s still around online as abandonware and while it’s not “modern” any longer, the bang for buck in getting a simple application going is pretty high.
It compiled to bytecode so you could even compile (at least console and CGI) executables for Linux, and there was something similar to P/Invoke so you could call system functionality for advanced extending.
The author of RapidQ went on to develop RealBasic, but for a long time afterwards (and still today?) there’s a large community of people making extensions and addon components for it.
I actually taught QBasic for a 100-level class at a college. It was very interesting to see how close it actually was to the "grown-up" languages they used for the Comp Sci curriculum.
Excellent addition to the arsenal of languages for bringing beginners onboard as well as letting advanced/adventurous people solve problems in a forgiving environment - its much easier and less invasive to install qb64 than say a VSCode or VisualStudio or even NetBeans.
More languages and IDEs like this will make easier for more people to find an on-ramp that suits them and their interests and ways of thinking.
Take graphics. You aren't searching for a library to handle graphics since it is built into the language. Initializing graphics takes one line, so you aren't creating a separate function to handle an over-complicated process. Heck, there's less documenting of what you're doing since the language's documentation usually does that better than you can. You simply dive into the next task, which is always doing something more interesting than over-engineering a project that you originally set out on to have some fun.
I understand why complexity has grown in modern development tools and how much of a hindrance simplicity would be for professional software development, but it would be nice if there were more modern options out there to facilitate programming for pleasure. (I don't really count languages designed for education, since they're usually designed to deliver a curriculum. Something like Arduino would be a good example, since it is designed to facilitate creative projects.)