30 years later, QBasic is still the best • Hacker News Board

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#61

Post by simonh » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

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.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#62

Post by dragonbonheur » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

smilekzs wrote: post #20

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)?

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?).

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#63

Post by snuxoll » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #59

dragonbonheur wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always Python+X somehow, where X is a whole different thing you have to learn to get a fraction of the whole thing shipped in Python. Keep I.T. simple - teach the kids BASIC.

The basic issue is that Python do not have a UI lib of its own, so if you want to do anything beyond a CLI you need to introduce a third party.

Isn't TK usually part of the standard library? Of course, then you have to build your UI in code, which can be a lot for a beginner - which I why I stated QML or GTK Composite Templates, both allow you to design your UI in the relevant tool (QtCreator, Glade) and then just wire it up. Speaking from experience, the trial and error of creating UI's in code instead of through a markup language with an editor that can preview it is a pain.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#64

Post by transfire » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

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.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#65

Post by j_s » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

TeachCraft (Python) discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599714

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#66

Post by dkopi » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:39 PM UTC

jsnell wrote: post #27

wvenable wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your complaints about QBasic but I disagree a bit about JavaScript. You are totally right that the environment being right there in the browser is great. But if you press F12 right now you'll find an amazing complex dialog box -- as a professional you just implicitly skip over that complexity. And JavaScript is a significantly more difficult language than QBasic even if it's one of the simpler profession…

Yes. I've been doing Javascript + HTML games with my 9yo nephew every now and then, and the complexity of the environment as a whole is incredibly discouraging. Sure, he gets assignment, functions, conditionals and other basics. But the interface between the logic and the presentation is just so incredibly abstract that getting from those basics to anything interesting is way too hard. I've been thinking of switching…

Consider using an HTML5 canvas (with a 2D rendering context) instead of DOM manipulation. It makes programming very similar to QBasic's LINE, CIRCLE, PAINT.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#67

Post by jbandela1 » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

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.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#68

Post by npongratz » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

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

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#69

Post by dragonbonheur » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

snuxoll wrote: post #60

dragonbonheur wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always Python+X somehow, where X is a whole different thing you have to learn to get a fraction of the whole thing shipped in Python. Keep I.T. simple - teach the kids BASIC.

I don't really think GTK is that difficult to get a grasp on with composite templates. It's a little less "magic" than VB6 since I'm not just dumping code into a partial form class where the rest of the accessors to the COM controls are generated for me, but it's pretty straightforward in Vala right now (I use glade to design a UI, much like the classic WinForms designer - annotate a class with a GtkTemplate attribut…

GTK in FreeBASIC is simple as well - just translate the C function calls into BASIC. FreeBASIC is really C++ without the curly braces so it's really a good covert way to gradually turn userland programmers into system programmers

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#70

Post by Jtsummers » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

dragonbonheur wrote: post #53

sevensor wrote: post #15

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…

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".

"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.