It was later replaced by DarkBASIC Pro (which was eventually open sourced years later) but that one used a more traditional IDE that was kinda reminiscent of a simplified Visual C++ 2005 and had a more complex language.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/UKZtMue.png
Looking back, I think QBASIC/QuickBasic had it right in contrast to other learning languages. You don't need a DSL, turtle graphics, drag-and-drop code blocks, or any of that stuff to teach programming. Just make the hurdle to getting useful input and output minimal, and the prospective programmer can take it from there.
On the other hand, I do wish I had been able to pick up things like C much earlier in life. Only recently did I actually learn C++ in my 30s, even though part of me wanted to learn it when I was 9. I think that things like QBASIC can also be a sort of trap because if the I/O is so easy then it can be difficult to leave it for something that actually is better but not in an obvious way to a novice.
When evaluating what is good for beginners it helps to remember not all beginners approach programming from the same place. Traditionally computational scientists were a distinct and equal in size subset of the users of computer resources in academic and industry research centers accross the nation, specifically distinct from computer scientists. Today they are smaller total fraction but that history continues to inform how they approach computation and mentor new scientists learning to use computers for science, which diverges from the way computer scientists do both in approach and requisite mental model.
The article is about teaching programming in general, not teaching it for computational needs:
> in any respects modern Fortran is an exceptionally good language to teach programming in
> Partially it is because modern Fortran is easy to read and comprehend, which is an important factor for the individual learning to program for the first time.
> The idea of introductory languages is not necessarily that they are suited to commercial endeavours, but rather that they are (i) easy to implement algorithm in, (ii) readable, and (iii) do not contain things that will confuse and bewilder.
You can also see his prior blog posts where again he is speaking about learning programming in general - not limited to computation.
Its origin is really showing: UNIXes and their line-oriented terminals. No notion of a screen-oriented console, let alone a graphical one, unlike most BASICs aimed at personal computers.
It's still poor compared to most languages I've used. String formatting is not simple for beginners. In Python you can do:
print(num_eggs)
printf("%d", num_eggs);
And on top of that, I detest languages that force you to manually enter newlines by default. Probably over 90% of use cases require a newline, so why not have the function add it by default, and either provide another print function or optional parameter for the times when you don't want a newline? The "I forgot to add a newline" headache is extremely annoying. Whereas in languages that add it by default, I rarely find myself saying "Ouch. I actually didn't want a newline there."
I do think that if one is an engineering student (not necessarily CS/CompE), then it's more useful to teach how to do useful stuff (e.g. automation) in languages like Python. In my day most schools used either C/C++ or Java - both of which are not very useful for people whose primary job is not coding. Engineering students would take that one course and that's it. However, I suspect most engineers will benefit greatly if they knew Python. Lots of tedious stuff to automate.
Even if the introductory course uses Python, I think they should cover useful tasks for automation - handling directories, and perhaps some basic network related stuff via requests. If you can't squeeze it into one course, make another one and make it mandatory. It'll be more useful than many engineering courses they'll take.
Mainly:
> Certainly things like I/O are still problematic for the novice programmer in these languages.
Poor I/O basically killed my interest in programming in most languages when I was a novice. BASIC was great for this. QuickBasic was, and probably still is king. People new to programming want to do fun stuff, and it's very hard to do without I/O. Me and most of my peers spent a fair amount of their hobby programming writing very simple games, or doing fun graphics stuff (drawing lines, circles, etc).
After doing this for a while in BASIC and QB, "serious" languages like C/C++ were pure Hell. I could literally do none of the cool things I used to with only a rudimentary command of the language. Did not know about Perl/Python until much later.
In my opinion, if you want learning languages to be fun, provide one where:
- Text I/O are no-brainers
- You can easily respond to keypresses (i.e. detecting if a button was pressed and not having to wait till the user hits Enter).
- Rudimentary graphics: Plotting a point, drawing a line and circle. Coloring it as desired.
- Easy way to generate random numbers.
Teach people these things, and they can have a lot of fun with loops, conditionals, and functions.