30 years later, QBasic is still the best
nicolasbize.com
30 years later, QBasic is still the best
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Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#2This made me smile. I remember trying to learn coding at 6 or 7 from my Tandy 56K Basic manual. I didn't get it but I tried all the same. It would have been cool to have someone there to help me understand.
It's a fortunate thing to have common interests with your child. I can't wait to have my daughters show even the slightest interest in coding. They are toddlers, so I have to just wait.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#3Wow... good job man. My first experience with programming was QBasic, and that was about 16 years ago. I only did it for a couple of weeks but when I picked up on programming several years later as a young adult, it all came back to me - assigning variables from user inputs, printing on screen, if then else, all the basics. Good stuff!
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#4I learned to program on an Apple ][, where the programming environment was always a CTRL+RESET away. BASIC was great. I carefully typed long programs that I found in the back of computer magazines, broke them by changing stuff, and fiddled around endlessly. Those incantations are still in my fingers (CALL -3116 for a nice visual effect, PEEK -16384 for the current keyboard key, VTAB and HTAB to get around the screen, etc).
I volunteer at a local Coder Dojo and there's nothing to give these kids who want to fiddle around like that. Scratch is the closest I've found (with the bonus of not having to necessarily be able to read or type), but it's still cluttered with logins and passwords... and, being a GUI, it suffers when the kid's computer doesn't have a big enough screen to manage the complexity they eventually create. It's a shame. I tell kids who've grown tired of Scratch that they can "graduate" to Stencyl, a game engine that uses a similar visual programming metaphor but lets you drop down to the Haxe beneath. It also compiles natively to desktop or mobile, so that's cool too.
Python, ruby, and JS are all really close to the ideal "type and go" environments, but they're also littered with speedbumps. Installing packages and keeping the environment sane are difficult enough for some professional engineers, let alone kids who just want to mess around and make cool stuff.
The woman who started my local Coder Dojo got her son started with his own Linux computer at a really young age and he's a whiz at it, so maybe there's no real problem here and I'm just underestimating the ingenuity of these kids. They'll get it done if they really want it, I guess?
EDIT: Kinda apropos, but check this out! http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/ I would've killed for these posters when I was a kid.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#5Nice 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/
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#6I learned to program on Texas Instruments calculators in the same form as this seven year old's application, I made really elaborate choose your own adventure games with if statements.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#7This made me smile. I remember trying to learn coding at 6 or 7 from my Tandy 56K Basic manual. I didn't get it but I tried all the same. It would have been cool to have someone there to help me understand. It's a fortunate thing to have common interests with your child. I can't wait to have my daughters show even the slightest interest in coding. They are toddlers, so I have to just wait.
I was around the same age. My dad was a big ZBasic fan, and he had me copying BASIC games out of a book and getting them to run, on our Tandy 1000. My oldest is 5, and I'm trying to figure out the best time to expose him to it. With the entertainment-focused nature of computing we have now, I can't rely on the lack of distractions that were present with a non-networked computer with a monochrome display. Right now, we don't even have a regular computer for him to play around with—my wife and I have our own laptops—so I think the first step is setting up a desktop machine that the kids can fool around with.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#8QBasic was my first exposure to programming, when I was 9 years old. Fond memories. Despite it having what today I consider terrible syntax, it made programming extremely approachable. After a quick "hello, world" intro from an IT guy at my mom's office, I spent countless hours reading the help pages and learning the commands. Sometimes I wish programming could be as simple again.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#9This made me smile. I remember trying to learn coding at 6 or 7 from my Tandy 56K Basic manual. I didn't get it but I tried all the same. It would have been cool to have someone there to help me understand. It's a fortunate thing to have common interests with your child. I can't wait to have my daughters show even the slightest interest in coding. They are toddlers, so I have to just wait.
I was around the same age. My dad was a big ZBasic fan, and he had me copying BASIC games out of a book and getting them to run, on our Tandy 1000. My oldest is 5, and I'm trying to figure out the best time to expose him to it. With the entertainment-focused nature of computing we have now, I can't rely on the lack of distractions that were present with a non-networked computer with a monochrome display. Right now, w…
I've had a lot of success with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 15" monitor. My 3 1/2 year old learned how to use a mouse nearly instantly and can click around on the desktop.
The Pi is $35 and has HDMI out and lots of USB ports. It's pretty great.
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#10For anyone that misses QBASIC, there's FreeBASIC that's a lot like it & easy to install:
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 faintly recall starting lightening-fast on QBASIC? Found a BASIC, FreeBASIC, that was just like it with simple command to launch stuff made in text editor and good documentation. Maybe half an hour of my challenge gone.
Next, time to apply lessons I remembered from high-assurance and Wirth. First, subset the language to minimum necessary. Used docs to test each in isolation to develop template & functions for using them, esp file I/O. Wrote formal spec in English & pseudocode of my problem with decomposed functions. Mapped almost 1-to-1 to FreeBASIC as expected. Did one refactoring. Executed code for first time to see successful run & solution to problem.
Yeah, BASIC is friggin awesome. I stretched industrial BASIC's, esp 4GL's, really far back when I was a hacker as they did rapid iteration, safe-by-default, and ran fast. Today, I'd say do a Wirth language like Oberon or Component Pascal instead. Still, BASIC has lessons to teach us and a painless bootstrapping for developer that many modern tools lack outside of scripting.