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I sort of disagree. I think BASIC is a good first language precisely because of its flaws. Those flaws give you something to strive to improve, and gives you r

by axod 17y ago

I sort of disagree. I think BASIC is a good first language precisely because of its flaws. Those flaws give you something to strive to improve, and gives you reason to seek out other tools. The flaws only start getting obvious when you start doing more advanced stuff, which is exactly how you want a beginners language to be. For example I started with basic, and found it ridiculously slow for graphics, so learnt assembly and how to make qb libraries with tasm. Then I just started writing programs in asm without the need for basic. I also noted than in QB programs you could make the code run slower by adding empty lines to the source code, thought 'woah thats lame' and decided I'd probably not use basic much more. There's always jarrings when you start to learn other languages - "wtf are all those semicolons at the end of every line? etc", but that's also a good skill to learn - being able to cope with new things that look odd at first sight. The other point is that there are massive amounts of existing basic code around, and resources. That counts for a lot. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't use basic for anything now, but for teaching kids I think it's more than good enough.

badsectoracula 17y ago
"wtf are all those semicolons at the end of every line? etc" - that is exactly what i thought (in greek :-P) when i moved from GW-Basic to Turbo Pascal :-). Then i moved from TP to QBasic because it was faster to run stuff directly from memory than via the compile->link->run route in my PC/XT :-P. Btw there is a ready-to-use language in modern (Windows) systems too: VBScript. Just create a new file in Notepad, use the .vbs extension, save it, double click on it and you're set :-). About four years ago I wrote an article on a Greek magazine about introduction to programming and used VBScript for the concepts (i mostly wrote about the general idea of programming, but i needed something people could actually use and see in their computers). A few days ago someone told me that he got interested into programming by reading this article and after messing a bit with VBScript, he went to learn Pascal and C :-).
- eru 17y ago
  Yes. Javascript is also readily available on most (all?) Windows machines.
  - badsectoracula 17y ago
    Yes it is, both as an ActiveScript scripting engine (you can doubleclick a .js file and it'll run) and as a component of a web browser (just add the script tags and it'll run inside the browser). But i think VBScript's syntax is easier on the untrained eye :-).

by axod 17y ago

badsectoracula 17y ago

"wtf are all those semicolons at the end of every line? etc" - that is exactly what i thought (in greek :-P) when i moved from GW-Basic to Turbo Pascal :-). Then i moved from TP to QBasic because it was faster to run stuff directly from memory than via the compile->link->run route in my PC/XT :-P. Btw there is a ready-to-use language in modern (Windows) systems too: VBScript. Just create a new file in Notepad, use the .vbs extension, save it, double click on it and you're set :-). About four years ago I wrote an article on a Greek magazine about introduction to programming and used VBScript for the concepts (i mostly wrote about the general idea of programming, but i needed something people could actually use and see in their computers). A few days ago someone told me that he got interested into programming by reading this article and after messing a bit with VBScript, he went to learn Pascal and C :-).

eru 17y ago
Yes. Javascript is also readily available on most (all?) Windows machines.
- badsectoracula 17y ago
  Yes it is, both as an ActiveScript scripting engine (you can doubleclick a .js file and it'll run) and as a component of a web browser (just add the script tags and it'll run inside the browser). But i think VBScript's syntax is easier on the untrained eye :-).