Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I learned with but hated QB, GW-B and MSX-B. Why? Because I could not make an "fast" executable (.exe) and the compilers those days (on those platforms) we're al costly and impossible for me to come by as a kid.

Man you should have seen my eyes light up when someone should me a full opensource, Linux, computer boot up! I CAN STUDY/MODIFY EVERYTHING! Muahuahaha.

It was a good learning tool, but not as good as LOGO (with the Turtle), of which I later made a clone (KTurtle, part of nearly all Linux distros).

https://apps.kde.org/nl/kturtle/




When I was a kid and found out that QBasic couldn't make an exe, I pirated QuickBasic which could do it just fine.


I am still so very confused by all the xBASICs, and I wonder if that was a big part of its decline...

I hope some mid-level Microsoft marketing manager is enjoying his retirement knowing we're still discussing this decades later.

Fun fact: for a while, Greek public schools taught a language that was called "LANGUAGE", and it was some BASIC-variant written in Greek. It came with it's own IDE called "The Interpreter for LANGUAGE" [1].

10 ΑΡΧΗ_ΕΠΑΝΑΛΗΨΗΣ 20 ΓΡΑΨΕ "HELLO WORLD" 30 ΜΕΧΡΙΣ_ΟΤΟΥ 0

[1]: https://alkisg.mysch.gr/


the decline of basic is the story of .NET and c#. MS stopped meaningful support for it and went all in on .NET.


And for good reasons. F# and C# are superior to Visual Basic -- for a language perspective -- in every way. Also dotnetcore is MIT licensed!


I do not disagree. The problem was the visual basic ecosystem was basically abandoned. I personally did not use it and thought it kinda of janky. But thousands of people for some reason really connected to it and could make interesting things. MS threw out all of that goodwill and forced Visual Studio 2002 which was utter junk compared to visual studio 6 and not really fixed until 2010. Yeah now c# is better. But at first it was a real head scratcher and the IDE made it seem terrible.


I knew it existed, but by the time I had access to warez CDs and found a QuickBasic version I also knew about the open source movement and GCC. :)




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: