14 ms·

30 years later, QBasic is still the best

• partisan 10y ago
  This made me smile. I remember trying to learn coding at 6 or 7 from my Tandy 56K Basic manual. I didn't get it but I tried all the same. It would have been cool to have someone there to help me understand. It's a fortunate thing to have common interests with your child. I can't wait to have my daughters show even the slightest interest in coding. They are toddlers, so I have to just wait.
  • organsnyder 10y ago
    I was around the same age. My dad was a big ZBasic fan, and he had me copying BASIC games out of a book and getting them to run, on our Tandy 1000. My oldest is 5, and I'm trying to figure out the best time to expose him to it. With the entertainment-focused nature of computing we have now, I can't rely on the lack of distractions that were present with a non-networked computer with a monochrome display. Right now, we don't even have a regular computer for him to play around with—my wife and I have our own laptops—so I think the first step is setting up a desktop machine that the kids can fool around with.
    • drhayes9 10y ago
      I've had a lot of success with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 15" monitor. My 3 1/2 year old learned how to use a mouse nearly instantly and can click around on the desktop. The Pi is $35 and has HDMI out and lots of USB ports. It's pretty great.
      • organsnyder 10y ago
        I almost bought a Pi for my son when he turned five, but then I decided to hold off (he didn't seem mature enough to be trusted with it yet). I want each of my kids to have a device that they can use how they please—whether it be playing Minecraft or tinkering with the hardware (including destroying it—I broke quite a few computers growing up...). What software do you have running on the Pi for your 3.5-year-old?
        • drhayes9 10y ago
          Well... the Kano distro is pretty good for "I'm gonna learn how to type and move around the computer". [1] They have a build-a-computer kit and are coming out with a screen soon? It's a little old for my son, though. It really wants you to type things which is great except he can't read yet. A colleague of mine had a lot of success with Edubuntu. [2] Her six-year-old is a whiz at the command line. Again with the keyboard use, so not quite appropriate. I'm still looking, basically. He likes clicking around and seeing that he's having an effect on things, but he usually ends up at YouTube, which isn't so great. [1]: kano.me [2]: https://www.edubuntu.org/ https://www.edubuntu.org/
    • estefan 10y ago
      Kids and computers are a great mix. I spent some time fiddling around with assembly when I was a teenager to run a TSR (terminate and stay resident, what daemons were called before they were daemons). It would hijack the screen when my little sister was playing a computer game and type out spooky messages like "Help me Sarah... I'm trapped in here" and then go back to the game after a few seconds as if nothing had happened. Ah, how we laughed (after her nightmares stopped)...
• eric001 10y ago
  Wow... good job man. My first experience with programming was QBasic, and that was about 16 years ago. I only did it for a couple of weeks but when I picked up on programming several years later as a young adult, it all came back to me - assigning variables from user inputs, printing on screen, if then else, all the basics. Good stuff!
• drhayes9 10y ago
  I learned to program on an Apple ][, where the programming environment was always a CTRL+RESET away. BASIC was great. I carefully typed long programs that I found in the back of computer magazines, broke them by changing stuff, and fiddled around endlessly. Those incantations are still in my fingers (CALL -3116 for a nice visual effect, PEEK -16384 for the current keyboard key, VTAB and HTAB to get around the screen, etc). I volunteer at a local Coder Dojo and there's nothing to give these kids who want to fiddle around like that. Scratch is the closest I've found (with the bonus of not having to necessarily be able to read or type), but it's still cluttered with logins and passwords... and, being a GUI, it suffers when the kid's computer doesn't have a big enough screen to manage the complexity they eventually create. It's a shame. I tell kids who've grown tired of Scratch that they can "graduate" to Stencyl, a game engine that uses a similar visual programming metaphor but lets you drop down to the Haxe beneath. It also compiles natively to desktop or mobile, so that's cool too. Python, ruby, and JS are all really close to the ideal "type and go" environments, but they're also littered with speedbumps. Installing packages and keeping the environment sane are difficult enough for some professional engineers, let alone kids who just want to mess around and make cool stuff. The woman who started my local Coder Dojo got her son started with his own Linux computer at a really young age and he's a whiz at it, so maybe there's no real problem here and I'm just underestimating the ingenuity of these kids. They'll get it done if they really want it, I guess? EDIT: Kinda apropos, but check this out! http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/ http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/ I would've killed for these posters when I was a kid.
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    What about running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi? There are even some distros that boot into BASIC and can work with the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-basic/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-bas...
    • nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Not to mention MikroBASIC that works with all the major microcontrollers. They have a MikroPascal, too.
• popmilo2 10y ago
  Nice to hear about such success with a kid learning coding ! All the best! There is newer, multi platform implementation called QB64 http://www.qb64.net/ http://www.qb64.net/
  • versteegen 10y ago
    Yes, there are a number of QBasic reimplementations and compatible languages. FreeBASIC is one that aims to be a (compatible) successor rather than just a reimplementation. I can't remember what the others are...
• carlmcqueen 10y ago
  I learned to program on Texas Instruments calculators in the same form as this seven year old's application, I made really elaborate choose your own adventure games with if statements.
  • rbanffy 10y ago
    My first programs were for a TI-55 calculator. No conditional jumps, only a RST that restarted the program with data intact, so you could do some tricks. I managed to make it solve second-degree equations in less than 33 steps (using the RST jump to re-run part of the program on modified data). Without the trick it'd require, IIRC, 35 steps, which were beyond the limits of that model.
• cesarbs 10y ago
  QBasic was my first exposure to programming, when I was 9 years old. Fond memories. Despite it having what today I consider terrible syntax, it made programming extremely approachable. After a quick "hello, world" intro from an IT guy at my mom's office, I spent countless hours reading the help pages and learning the commands. Sometimes I wish programming could be as simple again.
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  For anyone that misses QBASIC, there's FreeBASIC that's a lot like it & easy to install: http://www.freebasic.net/ http://www.freebasic.net/ After loosing my memory, I have to relearn programming nearly from scratch. I took a challenge to do specific program in around an hour, from language to toolchain to solution. Had to be system-like language. Got bogged down by toolchains, IDE's, whatever. Said screw it: why the hell is it so hard when I faintly recall starting lightening-fast on QBASIC? Found a BASIC, FreeBASIC, that was just like it with simple command to launch stuff made in text editor and good documentation. Maybe half an hour of my challenge gone. Next, time to apply lessons I remembered from high-assurance and Wirth. First, subset the language to minimum necessary. Used docs to test each in isolation to develop template & functions for using them, esp file I/O. Wrote formal spec in English & pseudocode of my problem with decomposed functions. Mapped almost 1-to-1 to FreeBASIC as expected. Did one refactoring. Executed code for first time to see successful run & solution to problem. Yeah, BASIC is friggin awesome. I stretched industrial BASIC's, esp 4GL's, really far back when I was a hacker as they did rapid iteration, safe-by-default, and ran fast. Today, I'd say do a Wirth language like Oberon or Component Pascal instead. Still, BASIC has lessons to teach us and a painless bootstrapping for developer that many modern tools lack outside of scripting.
  • Cyph0n 10y ago
    > After losing my memory, ... Wow, so you forgot how to write code? May I ask how that happened?
    • nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Just a head injury. Dont give too much detail as too solud testimony might be used against me in hiring or court or something. But, yeah, lost most memory except stuff I repeated most along with muscle memory anx hand-eye. (Shrugs). Supposed to be thoughtless drone but I do well here on many topics despite working with pieces and little short-term memory.
      • kragen 10y ago
        Man, I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better.
• jasode 10y ago
  >to realize that in more than 30 years, we have not been able to come up with something better for our kids: Qbasic ..., but we have never really made a simpler or more direct access to the thrill of programming than QBasic. First, I think it's really cool that he's exposing a young mind to programming. But I'm also old enough to have installed QBasic from floppy disks and part of me thinks his statements I quoted are romanticizing QBasic a little bit. I think that Javascript in today's browser is a fine substitute. I've had good experience with children that age by going to the browser, pressing F12, go to Console tab and start typing code. It can start as simple as: alert("hello world"); And boom, you get a popup. You can also show the kid he can type in arithmetic stuff like "2+3" and he'll get back the answer 5. You can then show him how to modify the existing web page. You can ramp up a slight bit of complexity by showing how to create a text file and writing Javascript and then having the browser run it. The 8-year olds I've seen can handle this no problem. What I like about the Javascript-for-kids approach is that it shows them that programming isn't some other universe where you install QBasic in a vm. Instead, the initiation into programming/experimentation is just 2 keystrokes away. There's something about the immediacy of F12-Javascript that keeps it from being an esoteric dark corner. The kid can also get more mileage out of his "programming" knowledge because he can use his Javascript console tricks at his friend's house on any web browser. On the other hand, playing with QBasic today is more isolating. The use of QBasic in 1980s had more utility because the syntax of '10 PRINT "HELLO"' also worked on Apple II, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc.
  • onion2k 10y ago
    JS is a fantastic language for teaching the basics of programming - introducing variables, flow control, etc. The problem is that as soon as you go beyond "write a series of statements and run them" and in to actually trying to write something interesting and fun with a little abstraction or actual software design then JS very quickly stops being a good choice. You can quickly hit synchronicity problems, weird scoping issues, data typing difficulties. Those are things that could easily frustrate an interested person. A hour or two of JS as an introduction followed by learning a BASIC variant is probably a really good bet.
    • 10y ago
• guard-of-terra 10y ago
  I don't think that QBasic is so bad as procedural language. All the primitives are there and I've never written any code with much GOTOs in them. Just did not feel the need even when I was 10 years old. What this article clearly lacks is SCREEN 13 Seriously, unsurpassed easiness of programmable graphics. Even by javascript, which is otherwise better for teaching.
  • manifestsilence 10y ago
    Absolutely, this is what I miss, both for myself and for teaching youngsters. Not even Python or Javascript has an easy way to just get a full screen canvas that lets you set RGB colors onto pixels and draw shapes. The python way is to import pygame and get mired in page flipping, creating canvases, creating your own event loop, etc. The javascript way is to create an HTML5 canvas, learn how to get page elements and store them in a variable, and where to put your code so it will run at the right time, etc. Both have so much scaffolding before you can just create some procedural graphics and begin to reason about x and y coordinates in a way that's fun and shows the power of programming visually. My hobby with QBasic was making variations on Conway's Game of Life. So easy and fun in that language compared to anything else.
    • thrownear 10y ago
      Have you looked at processing.js http://processingjs.org/ http://processingjs.org/ You can put pixels on screen, draw lines using simple functions and later do 3d stuff in it...
    • ajosh 10y ago
      Some screen modes[1] like screen 9 actually had page flipping as an option. You could write to the "back" screen buffer and then switch which buffer was shown. I used that to make a poor man's strobe light. I really miss the simplicity of QBasic sometimes. [1] http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/SCREEN_(statement) http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/SCREEN_(statement)
  • j_s 10y ago
    Nice - I remember reading the GW-Basic manual alphabetically and wondering why none of the graphics commands worked until I got to 'SCREEN'
• sevensor 10y ago
  My favorite thing about this story is that Basic was meant to be used exactly this way, for getting new programmers off the ground. And like everyone, I've got fond memories. We had an IBM PS/2 80286, with a whole megabyte of memory, a 20 megabyte hard drive, and MS-DOS three point something. At some point, I discovered that it had Basic, but it didn't have a graphical editor. It had edlin, which was still enough to write programs that told their users how awesome I was. Forever, with gotos. And for the record, I don't think using gotos as a child sabotaged my ability to write structured code later in life. "GOTO considered harmful" gets taken way out of context!
  • dragonbonheur 10y ago
    I've always thought that learning to follow GOTOs and GOSUBs was the key to understand assembly language. "GOTO considered harmful" is really what's considered harmful. I never take anyone who says "X considered harmful" seriously because of "GOTO considered harmful".
    • Jtsummers 10y ago
      "GOTO considered harmful" is about a style of unstructured programming that was prevalent in its era. GOTOs are certainly not harmful on their own. But they offer a power that leads to unmaintainable and unreasonable [0] code. Like the spaghetti mess that is callback hell today. Languages which offer structured constructs that are really just syntactic sugar over GOTOs are better [1]. Structured use of GOTOs are feasible. But it requires a discipline that is not found in the community at large. If you're responsible for any project involving more than yourself as the developer, you cannot assume that discipline is present. With regard to assembly, yes, the branching and jumping instructions are the gotos Dijkstra was talking about. No, he wasn't wrong. The thing is, they have to be used in a disciplined manner or the outcome is extremely fragile code. Which was one of his biggest hobby horses. He viewed programming as a branch of mathematics. Where programs could be derived from first principles. GOTOs, as commonly used, necessarily broke that process. They also make it nigh impossible to understand poorly disciplined code. Same thing with magic numbers, weak type systems, and a number of other topics. They aren't bad on their own. They're bad when used in practice because they make undisciplined code trivial to produce. [0] In the sense that the code cannot be reasoned about. [1] In a strict sense, they're equivalent. In a less strict sense, they remove or minimize the ability to make unreasonable [0] code.
• ilitirit 10y ago
  I don't think QBasic's mainstream popularity can be understated. Googling "gorillas.bas" gives you a predictable result. I suppose it can be argued that Gorillas and Nibbles are partly responsible for QBasic's popularity (is there a lesson in here somewhere?). However, like many others, QBasic was not my first experience with a BASIC language. Prior to that was GW-BASIC on PC (it was part of our introductory course to Computers at high school), and before that was Sinclair BASIC, which I learned in part from a book called "Peek, Poke, Byte and RAM" http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=2000269 http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=2000269 But my first encounter with a programming language was Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) I'm sure there was a BBC Kids show that featured Logo programming (yes, they drew shapes with the turtle), but I can't remember the name. What I liked about Logo was that, as a child, it seemed very intuitive, and I felt like that even without having touched a computer I knew what programming was about, which is a lot more than I can say for any other language I've worked with.
  • paulja1974 10y ago
    Wow "Peek, Poke, Byte and RAM" that was my first programming book, thanks for bringing that memory back.
  • npongratz 10y ago
    PBS had a great show directed at children called 3-2-1 Contact in the 1980s, which I remember featuring Logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_Contact
• spriggan3 10y ago
  Rebol ?
  • draegtun 10y ago
    Yes Rebol is a great language to teach kids, especially Rebol/View (http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html). Below is an example of it draw dialect: view layout [ box 320x200 effect [ draw [ pen black line 20x20 80x80 ] ] ] Many more drawing examples can be found here - http://www.rebol.com/docs/draw.html http://www.rebol.com/docs/draw.html
• smilekzs 10y ago
  I am curious what's there to stop a kid from starting a Jupyter notebook (or even Mathematica with all the FullSnakeCaseNames) and firing away? Sure it isn't complex at least wrt. the basics (pun intended)?
  • qznc 10y ago
    Most kids want to make a game though.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • dragonbonheur 10y ago
    Grandpas know BASIC and they can teach any version of it to their grandkids in under 2 weeks tops, they don't necessarily know Jupyter notebooks or Mathematica (how much does that cost these days?).
    • jgamman 10y ago
      $250 for home use or free in browser via the learning lab
• ccozan 10y ago
  Ha! Who didn't hack the gorilla throwing bananas? :) I learned to programm with BASIC [0] before on a Spectrum ZX clone, however that GORILLA.BAS [1] was a good programming lesson. I remember even now, after 25 years, figuring out the algorithms and the parameters of the flying banana. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_BASIC [1] http://www.jefflewis.net/archive/programming/gorilla.bas http://www.jefflewis.net/archive/programming/gorilla.bas
  • sevensor 10y ago
    In high school, we used to mess around with banana trajectories when we were supposed to be writing English papers in the computer lab.
• thedaemon 10y ago
  I remember learning to program with QBasic as well. It was so much fun as a kid. I painstakingly drew out full scenes with line and circle commands for a small text based adventure game. Good times.
• dkopi 10y ago
  QBasic was a truly incredible way to start programming. Today I'd probably recommend python with pygame, and especially the book inventing computer games with python: https://inventwithpython.com/ https://inventwithpython.com/
• GregBuchholz 10y ago
  No love for Logo? I currently have my kids experimenting with ucbLogo and FMSLogo. And one of our latest endeavors is to hook it up to Minecraft [1], but that is certainly quite convoluted, with having to run minecraft servers with various plugins, and then working around the borked networking capabilities of FMSLogo, etc.. I wonder what other simple approaches there are to programmatically control Minecraft. [1]http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2014/05/minecraft-graphics-turtle.html http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2014/05/minecraft-graphics-tur...
  • nomercy400 10y ago
    There should be more love for Logo. Very simple, very interactive, even without minecraft.
  • j_s 10y ago
    TeachCraft (Python) discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599714
  • Filligree 10y ago
    OpenComputers is pretty nice, but involves writing Lua code. It features a virtual UNIX-ish OS to put your programs in, including editors; in many ways it's like stepping twenty years back in time. Electrical Age doesn't have computers. (Yet; I'm working on a PDP-11 simulation.) But it does have a functional DC electricity simulation, and "signal processors" that let you do amazing things with simple functions, as well as OC integration. If you're interested, I could show you around the setup on my dev server. (Or you could join. High quality players are always welcome. And of course we've got both mods, if you want to experiment... :)
  • 6stringmerc 10y ago
    That's what I was missing! Lots of love for Logo here. Started with that first, then eventually to QBasic. There was a lot of time spent on KidPix for a while too. That thing was insane.
  • acomjean 10y ago
    I learned through logo in middle school. A language sophisticated enough to later (high school) write programs that would take equations and graph them. Plus who doesn't love writing software to create spirograph graphics.
• EugeneOZ 10y ago
  My first language too :)
• jeremywen 10y ago
  sonic pi was created for this very purpose - to teach kids to code - http://sonic-pi.net/ http://sonic-pi.net/
• mosburger 10y ago
  GW-BASIC (QBasic's kinda sorta ancestor) was my first programming language (well, other than Logo I suppose). I still have a soft spot for it and might not be a programmer today if I hadn't first learned on such an easy-to-grok-for-11-year-old-me language. I've toyed with writing my own GW-BASIC interpreter for yucks (because I've never written an interpreter) but never gotten around to it. Perhaps I should... I've been meaning to learn Rust, maybe that'd be a good excuse?
• mlvljr 10y ago
  gwbasic was the name when I was the kid. Never learned it well, will always have fondest memories.
• partycoder 10y ago
  As a person who taught himself programming (and a bit of English) with QBasic, and also have known many people that did the same. I agree with this article. But you have other BASICs such as the one for computers such as the ZX Spectrum. Python in my opinion can also be used to teach programming, since many high level constructs are optional and syntax is simple.
• someone_ 10y ago
  I agree- we should also have just as easy of a way to start off with drawing. Why do we need to install 50 frameworks, tell a window how to spawn, basically create a universe just to start experimenting with creating computer graphics? It's a (Width x Height) matrix of RGB values-- why can't we get a simple way to create a simple 100x100 box for kids to draw in? No reason your son couldn't tell a screen to print colored pixels in RGB value with the right syntax.
  • aaronblohowiak 10y ago
    Logo! Logo + basic were my entree into programming
    • someone_ 10y ago
      Ya I can see that, I'm imagining a way a kid could make his OWN logo implementation, though. Logo is cool because you see the things you tell the little cursor to draw being drawn-- how could a kid implement something like his son's program, though, where a user is prompted to type their name and hit enter-- then a smiley face is drawn if their name is noah and a sadface is drawn if their name is anything else?
      • Jtsummers 10y ago
        Start off with lower primitives. In Logo, for instance, have a "draw at pixel" command. Have a way of recording a state. The student can then recreate the notion of pen on/off and pen placement and movement on top of the basic primitive plus a conditional. Pen is moving from A to B, if it's on, it draws along the way, otherwise it just moves. Some challenges with the math involved in movement, but it's solving a linear equation. Minor issue with rounding, perhaps allow the numbers to be floating point and let the renderer handle which pixel to draw. Everything up to the external turtle can be handled in this same way as long as they have the primitives. Handling hardware, give them primitives to write to and read from devices. Build up the code on top of that to handle more complex situations like manipulating external servos over a serial port.
  • 10y ago
• cyberfart 10y ago
  I remember doing the same. Starting with a Qbasic book I had bought with the little money I had, I was already writing mud-like games and calculating prime numbers after only an hour. Though I wasn't lucky enough to have done it at that age. Lucky kid :)
• qznc 10y ago
  There are various good options: Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ CodinGame https://www.codingame.com/games https://www.codingame.com/games Squeak http://squeak.org/ http://squeak.org/ Logo (even in browser https://turtleacademy.com/ https://turtleacademy.com/) JsFiddle if you want to go for somewhat longer javascript https://jsfiddle.net/ https://jsfiddle.net/ Alice http://www.alice.org/ http://www.alice.org/
• esfandia 10y ago
  What's nice with BASIC is that no context is required from the programmer: you don't need to know about the call stack or about variable scope. It's the programming equivalent of WYSIWYG. It also doesn't hurt that BASIC used to be resident in ROM (thinking back of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum), and that there were nice and simple primitives for drawing on the screen. I agree with the blog author, and I still think it's the best language to learn programming. Everything else is software engineering, and gets in the way of the instant gratification that got so many of us hooked on programming. What's wrong with starting with BASIC like I did, writing increasingly complex code, getting frustrated with the resulting spaghetti, then learning to use GOSUB more, which then gets you ready for a procedural language like Pascal? At least this way you know why pros don't code in BASIC. The same path of frustration (and fun) can also be used to go from Pascal to an OO language like Python or Ruby.
  • dragonbonheur 10y ago
    You do need to know about variable scope with modern BASICs like FreeBASIC and GAMBAS.
• simonh 10y ago
  I started with MBasic on a Superbrain running CP/M, a very early ancestor of GWBasic and QBasic. I wouldn't start kids on Basic now. My daughter is learning Simple Basic at school, but we use Macs at home and the only way to run it is in a Silverlight container. All the variations of Basic I know of are too restricted. Don't get me wrong, Basic back in the day was is a fine learning tool. The fact you could PEEK and POKE memory and DIM arrays actually taught you low level programming and system concepts that are abstracted away by modern languages and environments. Those early Basics were truly suspended part way between high level languages and machine code. I appreciate the advantages of JavaScript, but also it's flaws. Learning to pop up alert messages is a cool hack, but beyond that it gets messy fast. Scratch is fantastic. It's cross platform, can run in the browser and specifically designed to be very visual and intuitive. You can watch the code run. Brilliant. Beyond that though a learning language needs more. It needs to be cross platform, support both procedural and object oriented forms and be capable of text, graphics, UI and web programming. For me that means Python. It helps that I've got pythonista on my iPad and phone. On the desktop there's also Jupyter notebook. At the end of the day though, teach what you know and what you enjoy. All the technical arguments in the world can't beat passion.
• transfire 10y ago
  To be honest I don't think modern languages are all they are cracked up to be. Back in the day, very large and complex systems were managed quite well with languages like QBASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN, and ran rock solid for decades (hell, a few are still operational). But today, programming is such a polyglotic mess and conceptual navel-gazing nightmare -- it really is no wonder that so many projects end in failure.
  • clock_tower 10y ago
    Beware of survivor bias. Most old projects failed, like most new projects. But why is it that the rate of failure in programming projects hasn't fallen? I've heard it said that the computing world in general operates on the edge of acceptability. As soon as the browser became fast enough to become an applications platform, we implemented the browser in the browser; as soon as good command-line interfaces develop, we replace them with bad windowing ones; as soon as dumb phones become a mature technology, we all move to highly experimental smartphones. This is probably most severe in programming itself, where our field's most free to make its own choices. The percentage of projects that fail remains more or less constant as our level of experience grows -- because, as we become more experienced, we move to more complicated models. Any modern programming shop could churn out successful COBOL waterfall projects at a rate of two or three a year; so, as we got good at waterfall and old languages, we all moved to Agile and OO. Then, once we developed dangerous amounts of expertise in Agile and OOP, we moved to the Web (and lost most of our ability to use IDEs). And now, with even Web programming in danger of becoming a mature discipline, I'm hearing a lot of talk about Haskell. Why does this happen? I don't know -- because I don't feel the temptation to do it. I program in C++, and I carry a feature phone...
  • bloaf 10y ago
    As an outsider looking in: programmers, fix thy tools. My first introduction to programming was QBasic in the 90s, and I had a great time making little pictures, beeps/bloops, and text on the screen. I then moved on to some basic Fortran and other engineering-type languages in undergrad c. 2006. My impression of the workflows for Fortran at that time was "this is more annoying than BASIC, but I guess its because its more powerful and complex. I bet they'll fix the awkwardness eventually though." Imagine my supersize when I decide to pick up the trendy modern language of Haskell in 2015 and find out that installing, configuring, and working in it was just as bad as Fortran back in 2006. WTF has everybody been doing for the past 10-20 years? It seems to me that because programming is a new discipline, lots of people are trying to reinvent wheels. There is nothing wrong with this, in and of itself, since we'll essentially be making sure that we get really good at making wheels and end up with really high quality specimens. The problem is that wheels by themselves aren't that useful, and no one is bothering to make an automobile. QBasic might have had square wheels, but at least they felt attached to something.
• jbandela1 10y ago
  For young children, QBasic and goto may indeed be superior to more structured languages. From a neuro development perspective we know that young children are very concrete and have limited abstraction ability. With Basic and goto, a program is more concrete (you run a line which is more or less 1 command) and linear (no nested structures). With structured programming, it is more abstract, and has an recursive structure (with arbitrary levels of nesting). Because of this, it might be preferable to introduce a child to the more linear, concrete programming model with goto and let them experience the thrill of programming then as they develop more and their programs increase in complexity, introduce them later to other more abstract methods and languages such as structured programming, oop, and functional.
  • clock_tower 10y ago
    From my experience back when I was 12: once you get ambitious enough in QBasic, you start to wish for some way of organizing the code and making it easier to follow. At that point, an intro to structured programming or OOP is natural. (Probably not functional programming, though, since functional's not very good for games, and what else do you think QBasic is going to be used for?)
    • bduerst 10y ago
      I was in the same boat at that age. I was trying to build a text-based BassTour clone in QBasic, and the book my dad bought from Radioshack didn't get into OOP. It would have made it much easier to do than that static-state version I cobbled together.
      • wj 10y ago
        I would love to see that if you did built it.
    • epsylon 10y ago
      QBasic supports subroutines (called SUB for procedures and FUNCTION for functions). You can write very structured code with QBasic; pretty much the only thing it lacks is pointers, but it's a very capable language otherwise.
• thom 10y ago
  It's mentioned in the article, but Microsoft have a nice BASIC environment called SmallBasic[0]. It's got a decent editor with IntelliSense, there's a community with a bunch of programs shared online[1] and it can interface with .NET code so you can extend it with whatever shenanigans your kids might require. [0] http://smallbasic.com/ http://smallbasic.com/ [1] http://smallbasic.com/program/?TETRIS http://smallbasic.com/program/?TETRIS
• JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Huge props to Noah for keeping an actual paper developers journal!
• thrownear 10y ago
  Less about Qbasic and why it is still the best and more about a parent bragging about their kid doing stuff with computers so early. I mean, just make the title "my kid wrote a text game in Qbasic" and do your bragging there. No problem..
• educar 10y ago
  There is another ritual after you start with QBasic. Your open gorilla.bas and nibbles.bas. Seriously, play gorilla.bas. It's one of the best games I have played.
  • kmill 10y ago
    I got my 4th grade class to play gorilla, which interestingly came with the Windows NT machines at my school. That and that reskinned Full Tilt! Pinball table Space Cadet. Quite a contrast. I personally liked modifying nibbles, for instance adjusting the timing loop so it'd be playable on a modern computer. On some occasions I made a special key which would put the snake on auto-pilot (just towards the goal, no graph search or anything), or which would temporarily turn off collision detection. Somehow both of these were possible without really understanding how the whole program worked.
• ajuc 10y ago
  I introduced my 10 years old cousin to turbo pascal when we met a few years ago. It took less than 3 hours to download it, install (also the patches to run on modern computer), make a game where you can move a circle around the screen, and teach him how can he modify it and how basic syntax works. There's nothing like that in modern programming. Python comes close, but is too magical.
  • bigger_cheese 10y ago
    My Dad taught me Turbo Pascal when I was about 7 or 8 years old, this was the early 90's msdos environment. I wrote one or two very simple programs got bored and moved on to other things. I just didn't have the attention span for it at that age. When I was 13 I taught myself html. I used to write webpages by opening up notepad in Windows 95 and typing in all the tags (frames tables even the dreaded blink tag). I consider this my first real experience with programming.
• darkstalker 10y ago
  I also started with BASIC. First was Commodore BASIC and then QBasic. I remember there was also LOGO, one of the original didactic languages. IMHO, if you want a simple language in the same spirit as BASIC, the closest you can find is Lua.
• adamwong246 10y ago
  Man, I wish I'd kept some of my .bas files.
• hangonhn 10y ago
  "When developing a skill, it is much better to acquire the right reflexes from the start rather than have to correct years of bad practice." I disagree with this statement. "Learning" is a long process of acquiring and also discarding habits and knowledge. The best intro I ever read for relativity was "An Equation That Changed the World" and it's a series of dialogues between Newton, Einstein, and the author (a modern physicist). Newtonian physics is relatively (haha) easy to understand. Once you understand that and then you can throw in some edge cases where it fails, you can introduce relativity and it makes relativity much easier to grasp. Likewise for programming. I learned with QBasic. Then as the code got messier, I started using "sub", etc. and then started playing other concepts until I outgrew the language. Functional programming came to me the same way. I outgrew my existing methods and reached for more advanced ones. All this is to say it's OK to start with easier and imperfect methods. We learn by acquiring new knowledge and then knowing them well enough to see their flaws before moving onto something better.
  • vinceguidry 10y ago
    I'd argue that programming isn't like other skills in this regard. Obviously if you're teaching something like the violin, where there's one right way to hold the bow and learning how to play holding the bow in any other way will ultimately hamper you, sure, it's worth it to drill the One True Way. But coding isn't like that. Sure, GOTOs as a means for control flow, suck for most serious applications compared to the readily-available alternatives, it's not like you can't build your own control flow mechanisms with their own properties out of the GOTO primitive, and learning how these work and fail is really good practice. Time spent mucking about doing the wrong thing in coding teaches you how to ascertain the right way. Other skills don't necessarily offer this.
    • hangonhn 10y ago
      Oh that's a really good insight. Yes, totally agreed.
    • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      There isn't really a One True Way in music either. There are stupid ways to hold a bow, and there's a small range of ways that works. But it's certainly not something you can reduce to a formula of so-many-inches along and an angle of theta. The arts are mostly practice led, so there are efficient and comfortable ways to get an expressive result, which may not be intuitive or obvious to beginners, and which probably need to be practiced. But plenty of people pick up instruments by experimenting, and some of them go on to have successful careers - because results matter more than technique, and if you're getting good artistic results perfect technique is secondary. And I think the GOTO thing is overblown, and misses the point in exactly the same technique-vs-outcome way. The desired outcome is legible, maintainable code. If you bracket a thousand lines inside a single if statement, you're not any closer to that aim than someone who uses GOTO. What's missing from BASIC - and from any kind of training that's syntax-based instead of concept-based - is that sense of using structures to simplify and highlight program logic and flow. PASCAL was fairly new when I was learning to code, and it was billed as some kind of magical mental training tool that would eliminate bad habits and make you a better programmer. In fact it's just a vanilla C-family language with a few quirks, and the mental training side of it was always wildly oversold. Currently no language at all teaches separation of concerns, chunking, relative abstraction, DRY, and other fundamental concepts in an accessible way - and there should be. Because they really can help turn hard problems into simpler problems, and make all kinds of challenges more manageable - which is more fundamental to programming than knowing that POKE 53280,1 will make the screen frame white on a C64.
• equalarrow 10y ago
  Author is spot on. My son and daughter have about 2 and 4 years to go before I probably intro them to programming. When I do, it's going to be a C64 all the way. And a real one. With a real old school monitor and a luxury a didn't have for about a year or two: a floppy drive. I've get a lot of the start with JS comments. But that would be the last thing I do. As a child learning, you need to remove the complexities and distractions of a modern system. Windows, browsers, edit js in one app, run it in another, use a mouse, open the js debug console, etc. Just wayyy to much stuff for a young mind to try to focus on. Don't get me wrong, they probably _can_ learn js, but after decades of programming in all kinds of different languages, just because js is the latest fashion, doesn't mean I'd every try to teach it to a kid. No way. BASIC, on the other hand, was created _for beginners_. I learned A LOT over the years when I was using BASIC. I also had magazines (COMPUTE! & Gazette) and books that helped immensely. I was just thinking yesterday actually, that it was awesome having the C64 Programmers Ref Guide that had the machine schematics and port pin outs in it!! You'll never get that for a Mac or iPhone nowadays (and these sorts of things usually only show up on 'hacker' sites). This was a book put you closer to the hardware so you could more easily understand what PEEK and POKE really did. :D I'm _really_ looking forward to the instruction days. The C64 was so popular for a reason: it was powerful & simple. This is how I want to introduce my kids to programming. They'll figure out Ruby, JS, C and things (maybe 8-bit assembly too!) later. I loved my C64 (still do) and I hope that will rub off on them. Can't wait.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    > Just wayyy to much stuff for a young mind to try to focus on. Keep in mind that most young kids can use modern technology very easily. My son was easily navigating around computers with a mouse at 3. I had him playing old ScummVM games at 4. > BASIC, on the other hand, was created _for beginners_. Yes, but C64 basic was also created when hundred dollar machines had 64k of RAM. And it's pretty painful to use. Not everything about it is just for beginners, it works a certain way because of hardware limitations. You might have forgotten that variables can be 80 characters in length in C64 basic but only the first 2 letters matter (Index$ and Input$ are the same variable). I've got a Raspberry Pi and if I wanted to go the small locked down computer for programming route I'd probably use that. Get a nice display and keyboard and not mess with technology so obsolete that there is no upgrade path. And then there's this: http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
• rbanffy 10y ago
  Who'd a thought thirty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier wine?
• edtechdev 10y ago
  Try to teach your kids programming this way, and you are more than likely only going to turn them off programming for many years. There is actual research on teaching kids how to code. Personally, I would start with code.org or Scratch. If you have an ipad, there is Hopscotch. Here is a huge list of more tools to teach young kids programming: http://bit.ly/ortonacode http://bit.ly/ortonacode But if you start with basic or python, you'll be teaching them that coding is basically similar to solving boring puzzles - not of any real use, and not as fun as videogames. Start instead with something they would find motivating or useful, not you. Making a game, or creating a useful little app/tool that solves some problem they think is important, etc.
  • jdbernard 10y ago
    I would love to see the research you are referencing. > Start instead with something they would find motivating or useful, not you. Making a game, or creating a useful little app/tool that solves some problem they think is important, etc. The thing is, I can't look into their head. Before my children had done any programming whatsoever I had no concrete reference point for the type of programming they would enjoy. My best reference point was my own experience being their age. And when I was their age this approach was the interesting, fun way to do it. This is a very common story. It is anecdote and suffers from all of the bias and unreliability that entails. But then again I've seen lots of un-reproducible "research" that suffers from bias and unwarranted assumptions also, especially when it concerns human behavior and motivation. I'd love to see, specifically, the research you are referencing.
  • sharpneli 10y ago
    Boring puzzles? The very original article showed what kind of programs the kid made. Far from boring puzzle. When I was 8-9 I started with QBasic with the first program being pretty much identical as what the kid in the article did. Then we did text adventures with friends. They were simply awesome back then. Then we moved to graphics as we figured out how to draw lines etc. Animation was beyond us but managing to draw something was brilliant. Around 12 it was C and games by using Allegro, and getting into slight trouble due to the nature of them. But it would not have been possible without first learning the basic stuff in QBasic (Oh the amount of IF blocks was ridiculous in some of the games).
• mineshaftgap 10y ago
  The best thing about QBasic was direct access to the sound card.
• username3 10y ago
  QBASIC.js QBASICScript QBASIC in a browser
  • Hortinstein 10y ago
    done http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=92 http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=92
• imakesnowflakes 10y ago
  I think kids should not be actively encouraged to learn to code early. You can learn to code any time, when you are older. As far as I can see, there is no advantage in learning to code early. But there are skills you need to pick up, and experience that you can only have when you are a kid. Let us encourage to kids to do those stuff..
• whatever_dude 10y ago
  I have so many fond memories of QBasic, and QuickBasic. Coming from GWBasic, I knew it was not supposed to be the best language ever. I had been using Turbo Pascal, and knew the IDE to be great, and the language more structured. I was also using C, and knew it to be fast. But QBasic was better where it mattered to me. When I learned to tame it - to name things accordingly (variable names could have dots!), to not use line numbers or GOTOs, it was so easy and fun doing anything in it. I could press F2 to jump to any function/method declaration I needed. I could press F1 on any method to quickly jump to its declaration/help, and then navigate help in the same manner (it was all hyperlinked!). I could stop my program in the middle of the execution so I could issue inline commands, print vars, and even CHANGE it, before continuing execution... even today, with proper debugging/logging any modern IDE/platform provides, I never got a dev/test workflow as easy as that quick iteration cycle that QBasic allowed. In time I started using QuickBasic instead (not the same thing!), learned to call interruptions, create actual executables, and do all kinds of crazy stuff most people were not supposed to do from there. Sure, running assembly from it wasn't as easy as Turbo Pascal (where you could do it inline) but as long as you had a library of common assembly calls created, it was just a matter of reusing it. The language wasn't fast, and the compiled files were a bit bloated. In time I moved to something else. But I still miss the intimacy I had with the editor and the language. It's like a first love, the one that got away.
• brianpgordon 10y ago
  I think TI-BASIC is a strong competitor. A free-form keyboard can be overwhelming and the different things you can do aren't very discoverable. In the TI-BASIC environment on the TI-82/83/83+/84+, the keywords (Goto, While, Disp, ClrHome, etc) are tokens which must be inserted into the program by selecting them from menus. So you get a rich set of powerful commands (easily in the hundreds, even for the simple TI-84, and many more for the TI-89) but they're all discoverable through the normal menus and through the catalog menu. You start out knowing a few commands like Lbl and Goto, but through the process of scrolling over unknown commands (like maybe For or While in the control flow menu) repeatedly you start to wonder what they do, and then try them out, until you know what everything does and you can write the cleanest possible code. It's a wonderful way to learn. And it supports both a text mode (with a "write string at grid position" operation for easy game making - text mode is a must on the CPU-starved TI-84+) and a graphical mode, with tons of stuff to do in both. For example, in high school I had a program that accepted a string of "DNA" and used it to repeatedly call the built-in pattern-drawing command with different arguments, producing a mosaic of overlapping patterns, so that each different input string produced a different final pattern. It's like 4 lines of code and kept me endlessly entertained in class. And that brings me to its greatest advantage- its presence in the math classroom. In middle school and high school, math for a gifted student is boring as death, and you've got a little BASIC interpreter sitting right there on your desk. You can transform hundreds of wasted hours a year into productive learning time.
  • hnal943 10y ago
    This is exactly how I fell in love with programming. My first program of any size solved systems of equations using 3 or 4 methods and showed its work. The satisfaction was incredible.
• artur_makly 10y ago
  im getting my toddler started with this RL code. http://www.primotoys.com/cubetto http://www.primotoys.com/cubetto
• nxzero 10y ago
  Key to get people coding, doesn't matter what the language, platform, etc. is in my opinion. Think I've worked in more than 20 or 30 languages to help someone new to programming write some programs. Each language has it own set of strengths and weaknesses, but normally my experience is that the person having a choice, is really important to them sticking with it.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• dunkelheit 10y ago
  QBasic is what got me started with programming more than 20 years ago. The thrill of writing a program that draws a rectangle, than erases it and draws slightly to the left and then watching the rectangle zoom across the screen hasn't been surpassed ever since. If you want to teach a visual person like myself programming and the programming environment requires more than one statement to put something on the screen (including import statements), it has already lost to QBasic.
• fit2rule 10y ago
  My kids have a great time with PICO8: http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php The fact that everything you need to build a game is built-in is very key to their enjoyment - they don't need to deal with any operating system in this environment, and have (almost) everything they need to be self-contained developers. (Built-in docs would be nice..) Its interesting, having watched the evolution of PICO8, to see the mass explosion in creativity around the scene, and I have observed a key to its success - by putting constraints on what you can do and how you can do it, while also filling in the inner space of those constraints with excellent tooling, you give people freedom - within a limit - to create amazing things that push those limits. You can read more about PICO8 (if you're interested) in this wonderful 'zine, which reflects the culture of the scene very well: http://pico8fanzine.bigcartel.com http://pico8fanzine.bigcartel.com Another big hit is LOAD81, from antirez: http://github.com/antirez/load81 http://github.com/antirez/load81 This, I think, is better than QBasic, in that it has all the same functionality in the IDE, but teaches them a better language: Lua. Plus you can install it almost everywhere you can't install QBasic. Anyway, in case any other HN'er out there is interested in doing stuff like this with their kids, give PICO8 and LOAD81 a try .. they're both, in my opinion, great ways to get young minds programming ..
• dudul 10y ago
  My post won't add much to the discussion, but QBasic was also my very first language. I was a little older than Noah when I first used it (I think I was ~12/13) and I still remember having so much fun with it :)
• camperman 10y ago
  Wonderful post. I did something similar for my younger daughter and one of her friends with Lua and Love2d. In just a couple of hours they had written a Breakout clone and also understood every line of code. Very satisfying.
• agentgt 10y ago
  I think Racket comes close but is still a little more adult. I remember going to GaTech early 2000 and there was a teacher named Guzdial pushing Squeek like it was gods gift to children and humanity. There is nothing wrong with the language but I have yet to see kids use it or like it. I have seen high school kids use racket though.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  Last month I reconnected with QBasic, was surprised about the live formatter and linter. And the pseudo module handling. Each function being seen as a separate entity. Sorry MS, I didn't understand how valuable it was.
• z3t4 10y ago
  I think Qbasic was so fun because it was easy do do graphics. Doing graphics in any other language is just insanely hard as you have to understand university grade math.
• mayreck 10y ago
  Honestly this thread put a tear into my eyes....I was literally your kid like 15 years ago when i first discovered quick basic on my own as a 10 year old. I feel this so deeply. It was much easier to learn that than anything else I've ever learned since.
• mrbill 10y ago
  Don't forget Ahl's "101 BASIC Computer Games"! I spent hours and hours making stuff written for DEC/MS-BASIC work on my TI-99/4A with its limited language implementation.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games PDF: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/_Books/101_BASIC_Computer_Games_Mar75.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/_Books/101_BASIC_... I had the later yellow-cover edition myself.
• Annatar 10y ago
  BASIC: an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Yep, I'd say that checks out.
• mark-r 10y ago
  So who will do an equivalent of QBasic for the web? It seems that the language is simple enough to be implemented entirely in Javascript. Then you wouldn't have to deal with the hassle of installing.
  • recursive 10y ago
    You mean javascript? It's already implemented in your browser.
    • mark-r 10y ago
      No, I mean implementing a full Basic interpreter in Javascript. For nostalgia's sake, or for teaching the kids, as in the article.
      • ef4 10y ago
        No need to reimplement. The original QBasic runs in your browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack
• tdeck 10y ago
  One important thing about QBasic that's often overlooked is that it's a community of 100% amateurs. I learned to program in 2004 in QBasic, although I very rarely fire it up anymore. By then it was not considered a "serious" language and we all knew it. But that meant the stakes were a lot lower. It's a lot of newbies and a few old-timers who do things for fun. This makes things a lot less intimidating for the non-coder. There are no conferences, no corporate sponsors, no polarizing big-shot Twitter personalities. It's a realm surprisingly insulated from the pissing contest of modern engineering culture and technical progress, where things that are acknowledged to be easy in other languages are nonetheless praised as impressive when done in QBasic. Another thing is that QBasic has no decent library functionality for code reuse (QB4.5 has a linker but no one knows how to use it). This means people constantly reinvent the wheel, and they aren't told not to. People copy and paste snippets of code and learn how they work, but they don't build ever more complex mashups every year. Thus, you're not on the framework treadmill or starting 5 years behind the curve. Things are done simply and idiosyncratically, pretty much the same way they were done in 1995 or 1988. Makes me nostalgic just thinking about it.
• jay_kyburz 10y ago
  I'm a bit late to the party on this one but if you are looking for a great way for kids to learn basic and make video games, check out http://www.blitzbasic.com/ http://www.blitzbasic.com/
• ender672 10y ago
  QBasic runs flawlessly in your browser at Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack
• liveoneggs 10y ago
  of course: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/ http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/ chipmunk basic
• mgalka 10y ago
  “OMG please don’t teach him GOTOs!!” GOTOs are easy to abuse, but they would really come in handy sometimes.
• kazinator 10y ago
  I tried (+ 2 2) on a four-year-old once. Instant, complete acceptance; no complaints about parentheses or lack of infix or anything.
  • copperx 10y ago
    There was no previous assumptions there that caused impediment for learning.
• jheriko 10y ago
  <3 I learned code from QBasic and its help because books were in short supply at the library and there was no internet for me. As much as Xcode or VS or Qt creator are great tools they seriously lack in that regard, as do most modern development environments. QBasic is very easy to learn and easy to use - and trying to solve hard problems with it requires some genuine skill and ability...
• bitJericho 10y ago
  The Monkey X programming language is a great alternative to qbasic. It's simple to install, cross platform, procedural, OOP, and incredibly powerful the more you get to know it.
• jedateach 10y ago
  :') My first code was written in QBasic
• jordan0day 10y ago
  One of my disappointments with the original Raspberry Pi was that I felt that its genesis story was from people whose early experience with programming came from Apple II's and QBASIC. It was pitched as a way to expose kids today to that same kind of low-overhead, get-in-and-start-making-things-happen experience some of us had 25 years ago. Imagine my disappointment when the Pi's getting started experience was "Boot into a graphical window manager, open up the Python IDE, start writing Python..."
  • lsllc 10y ago
    The RPi guy(s) grew up on BBC BASIC: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-basic/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-bas...
• demarq 10y ago
  I learnt Qbasic not that long ago it was my first taste of programming. However back then I couldn't afford a computer, so I had this Qbasic book and just had to 'imagine' how my programs run. Fast forward 13ish years and I own my own mac and know more programming languages than most of my workmates :) Although now I try and specialize in just three Rust, Javascript and Python to avoid being the 'master of none'.
• epicmellon 10y ago
  Oh man I am having a nostalgia heart attack right now. I remember coding a "guy shooting falling aliens from the bottom of the screen" game and hilariously having the aliens move not only through a timer but ALSO when you moved since there was no threading. Classic.
• aurelian15 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I started programming with QBasic -- basically teaching myself on my own -- when I was seven. And it worked. I was programming little interactive stories, drew crazy stuff on the screen, wrote small games. I was happy with it. The only things I was always curious about (and know one I knew back then could help me with) was on how to access the computer's mouse and the sound blaster. With my limited knowledge I never got that working until I switched to Delphi and Windows four years later. One of the best things I remember about QBasic is the help system (also referred to in the article). This where I found everything I wanted to know, including examples, about the language. I believe that's one of the reasons why I'm still more patient when it comes to studying software documentation compared to the average programmer.
• ErikAugust 10y ago
  That is awesome! It is not surprising that Noah's desire to program comes from his desire to make games. That's where I got my start, with QBASIC ~20 years ago. Before that, I remember wanting to take a Entenmann's Donut box and put action figures on sticks to make my own analog fighting game. How many of you got into programming because of a desire to make games?
• nhlx2 10y ago
  Emacs, then elisp perhaps?
• vmorgulis 10y ago
  BASIC-256 is a good alternative to QBasic: http://www.basic256.org/index_en http://www.basic256.org/index_en The voice synthesis with the "say" command is impressive: http://doc.basic256.org/doku.php?id=en:say http://doc.basic256.org/doku.php?id=en:say Say "Hello, World" (instead of Print...)
• vancan1ty 10y ago
  I think BASIC! for android by Paul Laughton is a modern good modern alternative for an entry to programming. It comes with good documentation and examples, and is a classic basic-type language. link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.basic&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.basic&... Once a kid might want to move up from that to solve perhaps more practical problems using PCs, I think a combination of bash (including basic usage of rsync, crontab, grep, sed, find, wget, ssh,...) and maybe VBA/Libreoffice Basic can take you a long way. (You can easily make nice little form/button based applications by dragging and dropping in the office suites. Also check out http://excelunusual.com/ http://excelunusual.com/ for some inspiration on things you can do in VBA which I would not have thought practical!).
• pabsferrari 10y ago
  My first language too! haha PRINT "Welcome to the club Noah!" Great insights for education