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I have so many fond memories of QBasic, and QuickBasic. Coming from GWBasic, I knew it was not supposed to be the best language ever. I had been using Turbo Pa
by whatever_dude 10y ago
I have so many fond memories of QBasic, and QuickBasic.
Coming from GWBasic, I knew it was not supposed to be the best language ever. I had been using Turbo Pascal, and knew the IDE to be great, and the language more structured. I was also using C, and knew it to be fast.
But QBasic was better where it mattered to me.
When I learned to tame it - to name things accordingly (variable names could have dots!), to not use line numbers or GOTOs, it was so easy and fun doing anything in it.
I could press F2 to jump to any function/method declaration I needed. I could press F1 on any method to quickly jump to its declaration/help, and then navigate help in the same manner (it was all hyperlinked!).
I could stop my program in the middle of the execution so I could issue inline commands, print vars, and even CHANGE it, before continuing execution... even today, with proper debugging/logging any modern IDE/platform provides, I never got a dev/test workflow as easy as that quick iteration cycle that QBasic allowed.
In time I started using QuickBasic instead (not the same thing!), learned to call interruptions, create actual executables, and do all kinds of crazy stuff most people were not supposed to do from there. Sure, running assembly from it wasn't as easy as Turbo Pascal (where you could do it inline) but as long as you had a library of common assembly calls created, it was just a matter of reusing it.
The language wasn't fast, and the compiled files were a bit bloated. In time I moved to something else. But I still miss the intimacy I had with the editor and the language. It's like a first love, the one that got away.