Very true. It probably can't happen for various reasons, but I would love if windows just folded python 3.2 in as part of the default install.
Python certainly feels, to me, like the most similar language to the old QBasic. Simple syntax, with advanced features that you can use, or not use, pretty robust standard library, not great, but usable IDE built-in (I assume IDLE still comes in the install?)
One of the really cool things about QBasic was that it had support for doing such a wide spectrum of things natively, and easily. In my first semester-long high-school course, we went from Hello World, to doing VGA graphics with the different SCREEN modes and FILL, LINE, etc, making programs that could play christmas carols using the built-in MIDI commands, and doing some animations that relied on some of the old-school page-flipping techniques that we take for granted with modern hardware and APIs.
I don't know of another language that makes it as easy to do all that now. Python with pygame would be a start, but it's still much more complicated to get a window created that you can draw in than it was with QBasic.
>we went from Hello World, to doing VGA graphics with the different SCREEN modes and FILL, LINE, etc, making programs that could play christmas carols using the built-in MIDI commands
I miss these in the new generation of languages. You could do so much cool stuff with swithcing to graphics mode and using pixel, line and circle commands. I was able to write a (1) shooter where you shoot down a plane that moves horizontally across the screen and the projectile was subject to 'gravity'. (2) A program that 'morphs' one outline to another. (3) A wireframe/3d space shooter.
I was able to build all this without the internet, with plain high school math and physics. And I wonder if I was a kid who grew up in todays environment, I would have been able to build the same. I have the internet, but I doubt I would be enticed into making stuff like that, like I was enticed by QBasic. I mean, one minute you are printing multiplication tables, the next minute you are turning individual pixels on/off on the screen. I remember it being a very empowering feeling.
Maybe Python has all these qualities, but it is - different -. If you learn programming with Python, you have to relearn it again to use any other common language, Java, C#, JavaScript etc...
Python certainly feels, to me, like the most similar language to the old QBasic. Simple syntax, with advanced features that you can use, or not use, pretty robust standard library, not great, but usable IDE built-in (I assume IDLE still comes in the install?)
One of the really cool things about QBasic was that it had support for doing such a wide spectrum of things natively, and easily. In my first semester-long high-school course, we went from Hello World, to doing VGA graphics with the different SCREEN modes and FILL, LINE, etc, making programs that could play christmas carols using the built-in MIDI commands, and doing some animations that relied on some of the old-school page-flipping techniques that we take for granted with modern hardware and APIs.
I don't know of another language that makes it as easy to do all that now. Python with pygame would be a start, but it's still much more complicated to get a window created that you can draw in than it was with QBasic.