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30 years later, QBasic is still the best

nicolasbize.com

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Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#31

Post by nomercy400 »

GregBuchholz wrote: post #30

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] htt…

There should be more love for Logo. Very simple, very interactive, even without minecraft.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#32

Post by rbanffy »

carlmcqueen wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#33

Post by paulja1974 »

ilitirit wrote: post #17

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 t…

Wow "Peek, Poke, Byte and RAM" that was my first programming book, thanks for bringing that memory back.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#36

Post by Cyph0n »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #10

For anyone that misses QBASIC, there's FreeBASIC that's a lot like it & easy to install: 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…

> After losing my memory, ...

Wow, so you forgot how to write code? May I ask how that happened?

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#37

Post by EugeneOZ »

jasode wrote: post #11

>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 ar…

Is it simple to draw a line in JS? Like in one line of simple and straight code, yes? I mean, not adding some divs to some DOM, but actually drawing a line or circle. Drawing is simplifying things for kids.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#38

Post by mosburger »

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?

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