I was playing with the version of QBASIC that comes with MS-DOS 5 last weekend, and it was a lot of fun. Part of the reason may have been nostalgia. (I delibe

I was playing with the version of QBASIC that comes with MS-DOS 5 last weekend, and it was a lot of fun. Part of the reason may have been nostalgia. (I deliberately choose that version since that it what my first IBM compatible had.) I think a more important reason was the simplicity. Take graphics. You aren't searching for a library to handle graphics since it is built into the language. Initializing graphics takes one line, so you aren't creating a separate function to handle an over-complicated process. Heck, there's less documenting of what you're doing since the language's documentation usually does that better than you can. You simply dive into the next task, which is always doing something more interesting than over-engineering a project that you originally set out on to have some fun. I understand why complexity has grown in modern development tools and how much of a hindrance simplicity would be for professional software development, but it would be nice if there were more modern options out there to facilitate programming for pleasure. (I don't really count languages designed for education, since they're usually designed to deliver a curriculum. Something like Arduino would be a good example, since it is designed to facilitate creative projects.)