91–100 of 133 posts
I 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…
I was introduced to Computers — as theories in school classes in the summer of 1992. By winter of 1993, my school got computers and I spent a lot of my time there, including many practices during the holidays.
I spend extra effort to learn things that were not taught in the school. I learnt QBasic and started writing tiny programs. My own trick was to use Graph Papers to match co-ordinates to plan game programs. One of them was a game where shapes are draw on the screen and you shoot it with an arrow. You have to hit spots on the shapes to do something - explode, write out names, etc.
I asked one of the girls to try it. She did and finally shoots a “heart” symbol and it burst with her name. I think I coded many things manually to make that happen and not very “programmatic”.
She became my first Girlfriend and we were for about a year. After that, we got drifted apart as we went to different schools in different states. No email, no phone.
The 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…
Not 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…
Those two languages make easy things simple. Basic does too, but with a not more noise ($).
You also don't need top install any language these days if you just want to learn. There are web based environments like repl.it where you can learn and practice basics.
The 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…
> it seems almost like a niche group of people who in the 90s were still using DOS a lot.
It wasn't really a niche group that was still using a DOS a lot before about Win95; Win 3.1 was separate add-on on top of DOS, and lots of important software still targeted DOS exclusively or had separate DOS and Windows versions.