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

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#81

Post by tyingq » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #37

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.

It's not one line of javascript, but drawing a line with an html5 canvas is fairly straightforward. https://jsfiddle.net/4cwmcagp/

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#82

Post by bloaf » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

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…

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#83

Post by JustSomeNobody » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

Huge props to Noah for keeping an actual paper developers journal!

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#84

Post by Filligree » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:59 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…

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... :)

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#85

Post by thrownear » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

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..

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#86

Post by clock_tower » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

jbandela1 wrote: post #67

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 structu…

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?)

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#87

Post by bglazer » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

someone_ wrote: post #45

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 colo…

https://processing.org/

I absolutely love Processing. It's a subset of Java with a dead simple IDE. Bonus points for exporting to Android, javascript, and executable jars for the desktop. Comes with excellent examples. The community is generally quite supporting and open as well.

And to answer your question "why can't we get a simple way to create a simple 100x100 box for kids to draw in?"

Here's the processing code that does exactly that:

void setup() { size(100,100) }

That pops a blank 100x100 box onto the screen. Drawing a line is line(start_x, start_y, end_x, end_y).

Adding interactivity and animation is as simple as adding:

void draw(){ ... do stuff ... }

You, and everyone else, should check it out.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#88

Post by educar » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

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.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#89

Post by thrownear » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

manifestsilence wrote: post #44

guard-of-terra wrote: post #14

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.

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…

Have you looked at processing.js

http://processingjs.org/

You can put pixels on screen, draw lines using simple functions and later do 3d stuff in it...

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#90

Post by ajosh » Thu, May 05, 2016, 5:03 PM UTC

manifestsilence wrote: post #44

guard-of-terra wrote: post #14

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.

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…

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)