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Interesting! Could you explain in a bit more detail how you used it for your CS project?

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Oh I just mean, QBasic was the language I used for that project. I can't actually remember it in detail now, but this was when I was 15 or 16. It was a database application; I guess mine would have been music lending. I wonder if I still have the code. I definitely still wish I had the book. I really enjoyed QBASIC because of the gentle way you were exposed to better programming practices; I've always admired that. Five or six years later, my uni project was a BASIC-to-C transpiler for a simple dialect of BASIC as a teaching language with some specific language extensions for message-passing parallel programming. It had a simple IDE, too. In some ways it is a shame BASIC itself is really gone; modern implementations only have a whisper of its original simplicity.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Python seems to have taken its place, specially with all school calculators having some variant of MicroPython. It isn't the same thing though.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Yes -- I think sort of the most basic BASIC programming is done with Scratch, and then they graduate to Python. In the UK I gather kids are taught Scratch and Python in an overlapping fashion, so they see the structure on the Scratch view and then have a better chance of understanding how the code works without being thrown off by the symbols. This is probably better in a pedagogical sense, and I am sure Scratch programmers have a better early understanding of flow control and things like loop termination conditions than BASIC programmers did; Scratch makes it more physical. But it does lose that absolute immediacy of being able to type simple words onto an empty screen and see it do things.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Scratch and especially Python are a lot more complex than BASIC. OTOH, Scratch having a structural rather than solely text-based interface might also make a more complex language immediately usable, by removing the difficulty associated with keywords and surface syntax. This is the kind of thing that would really benefit from a well-designed usability experiment.

Oh I just mean, QBasic was the language I used for that project. I can't actually remember it in detail now, but this was when I was 15 or 16. It was a database application; I guess mine would have been music lending. I wonder if I still have the code. I definitely still wish I had the book. I really enjoyed QBASIC because of the gentle way you were exposed to better programming practices; I've always admired that. Five or six years later, my uni project was a BASIC-to-C transpiler for a simple dialect of BASIC as a teaching language with some specific language extensions for message-passing parallel programming. It had a simple IDE, too. In some ways it is a shame BASIC itself is really gone; modern implementations only have a whisper of its original simplicity.

pjmlp 5y ago
Python seems to have taken its place, specially with all school calculators having some variant of MicroPython. It isn't the same thing though.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Yes -- I think sort of the most basic BASIC programming is done with Scratch, and then they graduate to Python. In the UK I gather kids are taught Scratch and Python in an overlapping fashion, so they see the structure on the Scratch view and then have a better chance of understanding how the code works without being thrown off by the symbols. This is probably better in a pedagogical sense, and I am sure Scratch programmers have a better early understanding of flow control and things like loop termination conditions than BASIC programmers did; Scratch makes it more physical. But it does lose that absolute immediacy of being able to type simple words onto an empty screen and see it do things.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Scratch and especially Python are a lot more complex than BASIC. OTOH, Scratch having a structural rather than solely text-based interface might also make a more complex language immediately usable, by removing the difficulty associated with keywords and surface syntax. This is the kind of thing that would really benefit from a well-designed usability experiment.