30 years later, QBasic is still the best

>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.

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)...

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!

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

But my first encounter with a programming language was Logo:

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.

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.