It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you'd grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an excellent educational tool, an excellent way to get kids "hooked" into "real programming".
Learning programming today isn't quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There's no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods.
This market did not go away. I don't quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.
They did, years ago. It’s called “Processing”, and it’s very popular. It’s also used by a lot of artists to let them make active or interactive art pieces without needing to be an experienced programmer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Resig
Syntactical it is similar to java, although only the simplest Java. No generics, no inner classes, etc. And let’s face it, even at its most complicated, Java isn’t syntactically complicated.
> I wonder if it is really that easy to teach programming with this language?
Well, it’s been in use for a number of years, and is popular among non-traditional programmers, so the answer seems to be yes.
It captures that vibe of an old computer system (where you turn it on and are ready to program immediately) with simplicity and an awesome community to learn from.
What they don’t have is the low level, close to the metal feel the old BASICs has. Even though they were interpreted, you could address hardware such as video memory and devices directly which made them a great gateway to low level programming.
I first learned QB maybe in 2001, during high school days. Then I learned Python.
Writing graphical programs in QB was pretty easy. There were PSET(), LINE(), CIRCLE() that were straightforward. But with Python, I had to learn this thing called "Tkinter". What the hell these "root", "unpack", "mainloop" mean?
:D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC
Seems it has since been open sourced.
Or just use the web platform: JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas API, WebGL, all of that. I think it's pretty close in terms of getting a pretty (motivating) result quickly without much prior experience.
(Unrelated, but I can also remember writing the first lines of code of my life in qbasic on a dos machine in ~1998; the blue screen definitely invokes childhood memories!)
SCREEN 13
PSET (1,1), 43
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4899799/whats-the-best-w...
1. SimSAL Workshop [1], made years ago using a scripting language (SimSAL) i wrote at some point in Lazarus [2]. I originally wrote it because up to that point i used QBasic in DOSBox now and then to try out algorithms and i wanted something similar running natively. Although these days i tend to use Lazarus directly.
2. VitriolBASIC [3] (sadly the site i had it is down and only that image remains from archive), a simple QBasic-like interpreter written in Java. Written purely for fun, i lost interest when i realized how hard and annoying it was becoming to run Java stuff on the browser (today you cannot do that at all unless you pay the certificate mafia and even then you get tons of scary messages).
3. WinLIL [4], this is just a playground for my LIL scripting language [5] [6]... i just wanted an excuse to shove it in yet another program. But it is a single self-contained EXE file that includes the interpreter, a simple programming environment, some extra commands for graphics and all the documentation i have available :-).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/AuLjMsP.png
[2] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/
[3] https://archive.is/s3Qf6/9ef5d8071b45fe792347b0dc12a1de8bfae...
[4] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/winlil.png
[1] https://archive.org/stream/BYTE_Vol_02-10_1977-10_Implementi...
Some examples worth trying:
- PICO-8: A 'fantasy console' that you can code within itself in Lua; absolutely amazing, not the least of which because you can inspect the source of every game made in it and there's a huge amount of games you can explore from within a game browser inside PICO-8 itself. There's also a version for Raspberry Pi: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
- TIC-80: A PICO-8 like, a little more powerful. Runs standalone, in the browser or on Android: https://tic.computer/
- LIKO-12: Another PICO-8 like. Runs standalone, in the browser or on Android. At first glance it seems like a more powerful LIKO-12, like one of the more powerful late-80s home computers: https://ramilego4game.itch.io/liko12
- BlitzBasic / BlitzMax: https://github.com/blitz-research/blitzmax (and see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC). Blitz was amazing. The thing that always impressed me about BlitzMax in particular was just the amount of actually completed (and often commercially sold) games made by people with the platform. Incredibly impressive. I never got to try Blitz BASIC on the Amiga, though I have plenty of fond memories of AMOS BASIC and the Blitz experience on PC very much reminded me of that.
- Monkey2: From the creator of the Blitz languages. More powerful than Blitz. See http://monkeycoder.co.nz/ (and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_X).
- FUZE BASIC: I haven't tried this one but only heard about it because it has an upcoming release on the Nintendo Switch. Looks very much like that late-80s computer experience though. It looks like they even make a Raspberry Pi-based computer around it in the style of the BBC Micro: https://www.fuze.co.uk/
Needless to say, there's no shortage of these environments out there :)
It can be complicated but you can always open the console on your browser, or jsfiddle and type some javascript. An you can ignore the critics and do the w3schools course in a day or so.
It's was the perfect first language. It's so easy to play little sounds or draw graphics, and the environment is basically non-existent so setup is easy. So much fun!
If there's a modern equivalent I'd be interested to know.
From the article you can do everything Qbasic could, but also load PNGs (_LOADIMAGE), fonts (_LOADFONT) and MP3s (_SNDOPEN).
That's where it all began. Upgrades were done (went to 64K of RAM, also got a floppy drive and printer - then later the Color Computer 3, which was upgraded to 512K, and the CM-8 monitor - oh, there was a 300 baud modem in there somewhere too).
Amazingly, I still have all of my old machines, and they all work (except for my printer - it was the CGP-220 ink jet printer, and the heads are clogged completely, and no way to fix or get ink cartridges for it).
When I was about 11 or 12 years old my best friend and I decided we wanted to make video games when we grew up so we needed to know how to program. His dad bought him a "for dummies" book, which just so happened to be QBasic for Dummies, and covered how to load the QBasic environment off the Win95 install CD and, well, how to write programs. We both made it about half way through that book before we'd finished middle school.
I don't make video games but I am in software. He went on to attend Digipen (back when it was still directly affiliated with Nintendo) and he now works in the games industry in Washington State.
Compared to GW-BASIC, QuickBasic was a luxury :)
PC Basic does what GW-Basic used to do. You can type old Basic games into it and they still work.
I used QuickBasic later (QBasic was essentially QuickBasic without the compiler and a few other features cut out) and many other things since.
By the time we got a PC, Visual Basic was a thing. It just wasn't the same anymore :( Motivated me to move on to C.
I also used a few other micros like the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC Jr. for a while.
Here is one post I wrote about it:
Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:
http://nordman.tripod.com/qgames.html
:) I miss the community that was the QBASIC Prodigy BBS groups. I spent hours trying to design better games and utilites, only to be outdone by a random stranger. We'd have to first make the games, then invent new compression techniques to get the big ones posted to the board, and i think someone even had a splitter/combinator thing to put the encryption back together over multiple posts.
I also miss the ABC Code Packs (memories: http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/basic/abc/).
Except, I won a pentium (286?) machine running windows 3.11 in 1998 as a 13 year old from a top hat raffle (yes, a magician's type top hat). True story.
It had a flavor of BASIC (I don't remember which) and accompanying manual which changed my life.
Now, as a 30 year old Creative Director in the "new media" field, I hope there are similar parallels for the "youth", especially within the rural regions of where I grew up.
If anyone has the capacity and wish to assist, a long term goal of mine has always been to provide a space for adolescents from similar backgrounds to explore these notions through the lens of Computer Science and Art.
pentium (286?)
Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn't boot W98 because the hard drive was corrupted.
It did load MsDOS and I found Qbasic using the help command.
I didn't have internet so I used to go to the internet cafe with a floppy disk and download tons of tutorials in plain text to read with EDIT.EXE
Now I've been working as a software developer for almost five years and love it, all thanks to QBasic and that old cheap computer.