I started with GW-BASIC on a PC. QBasic is so modern :D
Ditto.
30 years later, QBasic is still the best
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#52The post reminded me to look up a game called Black Annex, which was being developed by a solo developer in QB64.
A previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164068
https://store.steampowered.com/app/248590/Black_Annex/
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2033318/black-annex-is-the-b...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqlveWIhCFI
Lance, if you see this thread - I hope you find the passion to continue this project. What you built so far was an incredible feat.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#53I just bought ZX Spectrum Next issue 2 on Kickstarter. When I got it delivered my daughter turn 5. I think that it was good move, I also started with Speccy 33 years ago. Thanks to my dad which keep sitting next to me while I was trying to code I am a dev. I will not set the only way (my way), if she prefer taking care of animals or writing diaries I will not push her into STEM, but I will try to show her that having technical job pays off
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#54The weird thing about QBasic is that it came out in 1991, when Windows was already well established. So even though I started developing in the 90s, I immediately used Visual Basic and never even heard of QBasic for at least a decade or so later... maybe more. Lately there's been posts on HN reminiscing about QBasic, which is great, but it seems almost like a niche group of people who in the 90s were still using DOS a lot. (Which, granted, was a lot of people). But I completely missed it - it almost feels to me like it didn't exist and someone retconned history to add it in.
Now TRS-80 BASIC? Or Delphi? PowerBuilder? Or - wait for it - LotusScript? Now there's some languages to celebrate! (Joking, of course). I used all of them, the latter ones to make a living at one point or another.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#55QBasic was so much fun. Also because pre Internet time, the included help for each command was so good.
Just the random number generator was no so good.
SCREEN 12
DO
x = RND * 640
y = RND * 480
c = RND * 16
r = RND
PSET = (x,y),c
LOOP
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first time I saw X = X + 1 in a ZX Spectrum basic program listing, I thought it would cause the computer to catch fire. I was 9 though.
Zx Spectrum was actually less confusing because it required LET before variable assignment.
Ah yes, it might have been GW-Basic then. My uncle had a ZX Spectrum I would play with but the books I could get were all for IBM PCs.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you draw a line on the screen in Python? Using only stdlib: import turtle turtle.penup() turtle.pencolor(colour) turtle.setpos(x1,y1) turtle.pendown() turtle.goto(x2,y2)
I am guessing that is straight-up LOGO on Python.
Not exactly, but the turtle library was inspired by Logo, and designed to enable fairly direct translation of Logo code.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#58Not to be contrarian, but Python is even simpler than Basic. You don't have GOTO, but you don't need it. Just using a subset of Python language you can do anything you need, and with less syntactic noise.
BASIC was my first language, and today my favorite is Python. Not to claim better worse, but I can think of some differences from a teaching perspective:
1. BASIC was typically either built-in, or accessible via a single command from the disks that came with the computer. Beginners often get lost trying to install Python. If three beginners independently google "install Python" and follow the first blog that comes up, they will get three mutually incompatible installations.
2. The BASIC interpreters were self contained -- you learned a small number of keywords, and everything else had to be composed from them. Python is huge, and some of its keywords are conceptually brutal for beginners. And that's before you introduce even a few of the familiar packages.
3. Look at the official list of Python keywords. Half of them describe concepts that are brutal for beginners.
I'm not saying progress is a bad thing. The Python ecosystem can be bigger today because code is so easy to transport. It needs to be bigger because more complex programs need that stuff to have a chance of working. But teaching Python involves a dilemma that didn't really have to be considered for BASIC: What small subset of this thing do we try to teach?
We end up with a subset that looks like BASIC, and we simply tell them how to install it so they have a reliable starting point.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#59BBC Basic on the BBC Model B was the equivalent in the UK
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#60Not to be contrarian, but Python is even simpler than Basic. You don't have GOTO, but you don't need it. Just using a subset of Python language you can do anything you need, and with less syntactic noise.
BASIC was my first language, and today my favorite is Python. Not to claim better worse, but I can think of some differences from a teaching perspective: 1. BASIC was typically either built-in, or accessible via a single command from the disks that came with the computer. Beginners often get lost trying to install Python. If three beginners independently google "install Python" and follow the first blog that comes up…
> you learned a small number of keywords, and everything else had to be composed from them. Python is huge
QBASIC has 60+ keywords, Python 3 has 35.
> Look at the official list of Python keywords. Half of them describe concepts that are brutal for beginners.
Here's the list:
False await else import pass None break except in raise True class finally is return and continue for lambda try as def from nonlocal while assert del global not with async elif if or yield
Which of them do you think “concern concepts that are brutal for beginners”? (I could maybe buy async, await, and yield.)
OTOH, QBASIC’s BLOAD, BSAVE, PEEK, POKE, and CALL ABSOLUTE, among others aren’t particularly dealing with beginner-friendly concepts.