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30 years later, QBasic is still the best

nicolasbize.com

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Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#181

Post by Annatar »

jandrese wrote: post #118
mzs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be onto something. For my oldest son I tried to help him along in python. Just poking about in the interpreter went great, but pygame overwhelmed him and when his laptop died he never picked-up again where he left-off. For my youngest son I introduced him to awk first. In an editor he would edit the script and then run it in the terminal. I explained how every line goes in order. At first his script…

You are teaching him awk? Are you trying to create a supervillain?

AWK is one of the best and simplest languages for a beginner to learn programming.

As if that were not enough, it is lightning fast, small, and powerful. When Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan invented AWK, their intent was to invent the next generation C, without having to allocate memory or deal with pointers or data types, and in that, they were a success. AWK is C on steroids.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#182

Post by Annatar »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #155
jasode wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. That observation is fascinating to me. Isn't it possible that we're judging it with adult eyes? To me, kids can filter out "ui complexity" that's not relevant to whatever exploration they are doing. Examples I think of: A microwave oven[1] might have 25 separate buttons on it b…

Yeah.. kids are tougher than we tend to give them credit for. I got an Amiga 500 when I was 10 years old, try playing Carrier Command, Elite or something like that without a manual and no clue what any of the words mean :) We sometimes didn't get very far, or missed out on many aspects, but there was still so much we did get out of it, so we kept hanging on, and with everything we understood, other things became easi…

Ah, Carrier Command... I'm going to have to play that again. Powered on my Amiga 500 on my desk yesterday after almost two years, and to my amazement the battery kept the correct time.

$c00000 - FAKE FAST LOCATED

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#183

Post by zeckalpha »

DanBC wrote: post #104
neckro23 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

var drawing = document.createElement('canvas'); document.body.appendChild(drawing); var ctx = drawing.getContext('2d'); ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(0, 0); ctx.lineTo(100, 100); ctx.stroke(); There's a bit of ceremony in setting up the canvas, but yes, it's simple.

qbasic: SCREEN 13 LINE (X1, Y1) - (X2, Y2), COLOUR

Maybe there's room for a qbas.js which introduces some helpers like this?

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#184

Post by Annatar »

icebraining wrote: post #26
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…

As someone who actually learned programming with JavaScript, back in IE 5 days, I agree. Writing dumb little "guess the number" games or copy-pasting snippets from DynamicDrive.com to study and adapt made it very easy to get started, and that you can upload it to a free host and share the link gives you an extra incentive. I've since learned a few more languages, and I don't particularly enjoy writing complex JS prog…

You missed out - there is nothing quite like getting your first picture on the screen with the Copper, or doing your first scroller with the Blitter, or hearing your first Future Composer tune play correctly inside of a working level 3 interrupt request...

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#185

Post by versteegen »

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…

I've been using FreeBASIC for about 10 years and help maintain a 100+kLOC codebase written in it (a game engine).

FreeBASIC has multiple dialects; there's the qb dialect that supports most of QB except some audio and real-mode DOS-related commands, and the modern fb dialect, which is all of C plus half of C++ with BASIC syntax. And it does improve on C and C++ in several ways, like much better string support and a "preprocessor" that looks like the C preprocessor but is far more powerful (it's not a preprocessor, so it knows about types and variables, etc).

Of course it's not better than QBasic in every way: it's not interpreted with that awesome edit-and-continue ability that QBasic had. And the compiler can be quite buggy.

There are also a number of other QB successor languages, like QB64, which has a focus on the QBasic IDE and supporting all of the audio-visual stuff QB had fully. But (after comparing the codebases) will say FB is written far more like a professional product.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#187

Post by versteegen »

popmilo2 wrote: post #5

Nice to hear about such success with a kid learning coding ! All the best! There is newer, multi platform implementation called QB64 http://www.qb64.net/

Yes, there are a number of QBasic reimplementations and compatible languages. FreeBASIC is one that aims to be a (compatible) successor rather than just a reimplementation. I can't remember what the others are...

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#188

Post by marssaxman »

david-given wrote: post #179
todd8 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is there is no ISO Standard for the appliance interfaces. Do you press power level first? Or time first. Is it Forth like, numbers then operation or Haskell like, Function then number. My refrigerator has illuminated bars indicating how cold it is set for. Even after downloading a pdf of the user guide I can't figure out if I'm setting it correctly. Placing a thermometer inside and using trial and er…

My microwave has two knobs. One for power, one for time. It turns on automatically when you turn the timer and turns off automatically (sounding a mechanical bell) when the timer hits zero. I believe the timer is clockwork.

I used one of those microwaves once. Best interface ever, and so much simpler than the high-tech beepy button matrix! Do microwave manufacturers just not realize that they're making their products worse by complicating them? I don't get it.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#189

Post by Annatar »

transfire wrote: post #64

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.

Fortran is still numero uno when it comes to finite element analysis and high performance computing industries: not only does the Formula TRanslator language lend itself particularly well to expressing physics and mathematical equations needed for doing finite element analysis, but intel and PGI ship ultramodern Fortran compilers which generate very fast machine code, faster than even optimizing C compilers. intel ships their Fortran compiler with support and optimizations for their latest processor features and instruction sets (for instance, AVX), and PGI pioneered a Fortran compiler which can compile Fortran directly into NVidia GPU code.

Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best

#190

Post by relaytheurgency »

equalarrow wrote: post #116

Author is spot on. My son and daughter have about 2 and 4 years to go before I probably intro them to programming. When I do, it's going to be a C64 all the way. And a real one. With a real old school monitor and a luxury a didn't have for about a year or two: a floppy drive. I've get a lot of the start with JS comments. But that would be the last thing I do. As a child learning, you need to remove the complexities a…

In the year 2000 or so I got an old C64. That's what got me into computers. It was a lot of fun. I wish I still had it.
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