The big advantage for using BASIC to teach young children is its concreteness. In my experience, some kids have trouble understanding nested blocks (for example in Python, why the stuff in an if block is different than the surrounding code). With BASIC and GOTO everything is explicit and concrete and at the same level. They just have to trace though the program one line at a time to understand it.
30 years later, QBasic is still the best
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Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#12I will never forget the day that I spent debugging an early QBasic program that included a line similar to
5 = x
For those too young to know -- magazines used to come with page-long Basic programs for games that you could type in, debug (there were always typos), and play.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#13Basic was, and still is, an excellent language for introduction to programming. Yes, there are things you shouldn't do, but that applies to every programming language. There is nothing quite so simple, pure and fun as the older programming languages. Everything is a little bit bloated today - but it is infinitely much better when done right than you could ever do with these old languages. for introduction, kudos! jus…
One must definitely beware of looking back with rose colored glasses. A couple years ago I came across the BASIC source code for Oregon Trail, and I thought, "Hmm, might be fun to convert it to C." Started poking at it, and... Blargh! It was pretty disgusting. I don't think the program, disgusting as it was, was really unusual or bad for the time, though, and I am certain I wrote similar code on my trusty TI99/4A and thought it was just fine at the time. But then I was just a little kid, and maybe it's just right for a kid, I don't know.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#14I owe Basic a lot. It got me into programming on our first family pc, a Compaq Presario around '94. QBasic was accessible on every windows installation from the command prompt. You could read the programming guide built into the editor and have your first running code shortly after. That was its true power.
One of my first programs was teaching me french words, asking me to translate them in a random order until I got them all right. It was truly magical.
I also made pixels move, trying to write games, but I quickly ran into limitations and problems organizing my code. If you like a small challenge, watch a few minutes of this video about a game called Noita, where in the beginning Q-Basic was used to create some simple physic simulations [1].
It was hacky yes, but I think if you're starting out, it's much more important to get something running quickly than learning how to do it the right way. When people speak of basic, they always seem to have the impression that you're spoiled for life after touching it, but I think that's wrong. You can always learn more and improve. It's breaking down barriers of entry, which is key. A simple editor, with an inbuilt help page and a run button is all you need.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#15I like BASIC and recently been thinking it might be nice to do some modern game dev on BASIC. My father got me into programming on a TI-99/4A [0] machine, so the BASIC language always has a place in my heart. However, I recently also came across a nice game development course from Harvard, CS-50 [1] (an excellent course, much recommended!). And for CS-50 the Lua language is used in combination with the LÖVE [2] frame…
There is SmileBasic for the Nintendo Switch.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#16I owe Basic a lot. It got me into programming on our first family pc, a Compaq Presario around '94. QBasic was accessible on every windows installation from the command prompt. You could read the programming guide built into the editor and have your first running code shortly after. That was its true power. One of my first programs was teaching me french words, asking me to translate them in a random order until I go…
Same for me, but ’93, a different computer model and I borrowed a Qbasic manual from my brother who was in college
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#17The big advantage for using BASIC to teach young children is its concreteness. In my experience, some kids have trouble understanding nested blocks (for example in Python, why the stuff in an if block is different than the surrounding code). With BASIC and GOTO everything is explicit and concrete and at the same level. They just have to trace though the program one line at a time to understand it.
I also find the idea that “if you teach kids bad procedural programming, they’ll form bad habits and struggle with modern languages” to be specious.
I grew up with BASIC (Q and TI), then learned a small amount of MATLAB as a physics student. When I took a class in Scheme later in college, I was blown away by how its syntactical constructs prevented me from making the kinds of errors that plagued my imperative/procedural programs - at the cost of some cognitive overhead.
Cutting my teeth with GOTO didn’t make me resistant to structured (or functional) programming, it gave me perspective on why it’s often necessary.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#18I will never forget the day that I spent debugging an early QBasic program that included a line similar to 5 = x for an assignment in the first draft. There were tears and deep frustration at the moment I discovered that assignment had a directionality. The author's story brings back so many memories of learning and growth. For those too young to know -- magazines used to come with page-long Basic programs for games…
Honestly it's pretty strange that assignment has a directionality.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#19I will never forget the day that I spent debugging an early QBasic program that included a line similar to 5 = x for an assignment in the first draft. There were tears and deep frustration at the moment I discovered that assignment had a directionality. The author's story brings back so many memories of learning and growth. For those too young to know -- magazines used to come with page-long Basic programs for games…
Honestly it's pretty strange that assignment has a directionality.
It has to though.
X = Y; // what should change?
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#20And you can run it on your iPhone/iPad using iDOS app.