6 ms·

True BASIC by Kemeny and Kurtz

43 points by schmudde 3y ago

noelwelsh 3y ago
I wouldn't use it but I like that this still exists.
trealira 3y ago
A friend of mine was taught True Basic for a middle school programming class, and he really disliked that class (middle school is grades 6-8, for students about 11-14 years old). The next year they switched to teaching Python, and that frustrated him, because he thinks he would have maybe liked the class more with an easier programming language like that. This was in the early 2010s. On the other hand, it's not like he ever pursued Python or any other programming language outside of class anytime after that, so it could he that he just wouldn't have liked programming anyway. That's not to say True Basic is bad or anything. Some people tear their hair out over coding in C but enjoy other languages. It's just what came to mind for me when I read "True Basic".
- bruce511 3y ago
  When I was young, and I enjoyed learning to program, I thought everyone could learn to program, and they would enjoy it. Many decades later I've come to understand that programming is an intrinsically shitty job [1] which can only be done well by people who really love doing it. You cannot force people to learn programming. You can offer opportunity, but those that enjoy it will enjoy it. The language is irrelevant - joy trumps difficulty. This is true for so many well-paid jobs. Smart kids get pushed into medicine, but good doctors are those that like being around sick people (and making them better). Sure it pays well, but often that's a sign that its a shitty job with a high skill level, and high societal value. I'd still be programming even if I didn't get paid. It gets my motor running. But I understand now that its not for everyone. [1] go on, describe your job to a middle schooler. Hours behind a desk, staring at a screen, spending hours to find out what a comma should have been a period... it's their very definition of a nightmare.
  - janwillemb 3y ago
    It is the creativity of making new stuff that is the fun of programming. That should outweigh the shittyness described.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      You think that, I think that, and it's the tiny bits of creativity that delight me. But most of my job is not creative. Writing another json interface to some random API is not creative. Very, very, seldom is my creativity visible to others, and in more than a few cases the creativity works against the project in the long run. But I love it anyway... :)
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      No company allows you to be creative.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    My mom was an accountant, and I used to think that would be hell, just sitting in excel all day, tabulating endless columns of numbers... But really someone else must say exactly the same thing about my fully engrossing coding or sysadminning. For me it's building castles and engines, but to someone else it's just "sitting in front of an editor all day"
andrewl 3y ago
What is everybody’s opinion on Edsger Dijkstra’s quote “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” I’ve seen several version of Basic, but I’ve written only a a small bit of code in one of them, and that was 30 years ago. So I don’t know enough about the language to know what his objection was. The language I’ve programmed in the most is Ruby (also my favorite so far), and the one that interests me the most to look at next is probably Pharo. And I know Dijkstra did not like object-oriented languages, either.
- nanolith 3y ago
  I started writing software as a child, in the eighties. I only had access to various forms of BASIC and machine code. I switched to C in the early nineties, when I got access to Turbo C in middle school. Later, I got access to Minix, BSD, and Linux. I turned out fine. I'm a fan of Dijkstra, but it's best to take his opinions with an appropriate dose of salt. He liked to be provocative.
- sowbug 3y ago
  The version of BASIC I learned (Applesoft) had little support for functions and no concept of scoping. Every variable was global. GOSUB acted a little like a function, but barely (no function parameters, and without variable scoping a parameter is meaningless anyway). Without these features, it was very hard to write a program of any size without it becoming a mess. I wouldn't go so far as to say BASIC breaks your brain, but it is almost antithetical to structured programming, and eventually you need to learn structured programming if you plan to write maintainable code. There is also an argument against learning programming with languages that have no concept of a heap. I agree that a C pointer is a weird thing at first, and some people never get it. But I've softened my stance over the years. People can be productive coders without being bit twiddlers.
- analog31 3y ago
  I learned Dartmouth BASIC on a timeshare in 1981. Variable names are single letter, or a letter and a digit. All variables are global. No function headers. Branching by GOTO. It means that modularity and structure are virtually impossible. It practically forced you to write obfuscated code, and programs larger than a few dozen lines become exponentially harder to manage. Imagine the worst code you've ever seen. People who got good at coding in this way tended to develop mental habits that had to be un-learned when they moved to a more advanced language such as Pascal, as I did. With that said, beginners in any "scripting" language can evolve in the same way, if not taught some better habits. I've seen some Python programs that were as bad as my BASIC programs.
ianbicking 3y ago
Huh, for $15 you can buy a string add-on with things like LTRIM$, REPSTR$, etc... https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-handling-tk https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-hand...
- LispSporks22 3y ago
  I think Shen (fancy Lisp) has a similar model
- schmudde 3y ago
  For just $4 more you can buy the Atari ST version!
WoodenChair 3y ago
When I was 9 years old in 1996, my dad got me TrueBASIC. It was one of my first programming languages. And it was cool to be able to create programs that draw graphics and output executables. Something I hadn't done before. The manual was good enough to get started. I made some games over the next few years before I moved on to RealBASIC (now Xojo). Perhaps if there had been some kind of online community I would've taken it much further. At the time, I was not aware of QBasic or any of the other common similar BASICs. What I can tell you looking back is that it was a fine way to get started. We can debate whether it would still make sense to use something like this over Python for a modern 9-year-old. Certainly it's much more limited. But I will say there are just a lot fewer foot guns for a complete beginner. There's less surface area, so there is less to learn, but also less to do. I don't think that's such a bad tradeoff actually. Sometimes limitations actually spark imagination. And it's motivating to be able to learn all of something. But there are certainly free/open source BASICs that are just as good today. It's a legacy product.
AndrewOMartin 3y ago
1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists. 1974 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964. https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...

43 points by schmudde 3y ago

I wouldn't use it but I like that this still exists.

A friend of mine was taught True Basic for a middle school programming class, and he really disliked that class (middle school is grades 6-8, for students about 11-14 years old). The next year they switched to teaching Python, and that frustrated him, because he thinks he would have maybe liked the class more with an easier programming language like that. This was in the early 2010s. On the other hand, it's not like he ever pursued Python or any other programming language outside of class anytime after that, so it could he that he just wouldn't have liked programming anyway. That's not to say True Basic is bad or anything. Some people tear their hair out over coding in C but enjoy other languages. It's just what came to mind for me when I read "True Basic".

bruce511 3y ago
When I was young, and I enjoyed learning to program, I thought everyone could learn to program, and they would enjoy it. Many decades later I've come to understand that programming is an intrinsically shitty job [1] which can only be done well by people who really love doing it. You cannot force people to learn programming. You can offer opportunity, but those that enjoy it will enjoy it. The language is irrelevant - joy trumps difficulty. This is true for so many well-paid jobs. Smart kids get pushed into medicine, but good doctors are those that like being around sick people (and making them better). Sure it pays well, but often that's a sign that its a shitty job with a high skill level, and high societal value. I'd still be programming even if I didn't get paid. It gets my motor running. But I understand now that its not for everyone. [1] go on, describe your job to a middle schooler. Hours behind a desk, staring at a screen, spending hours to find out what a comma should have been a period... it's their very definition of a nightmare.
- janwillemb 3y ago
  It is the creativity of making new stuff that is the fun of programming. That should outweigh the shittyness described.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    You think that, I think that, and it's the tiny bits of creativity that delight me. But most of my job is not creative. Writing another json interface to some random API is not creative. Very, very, seldom is my creativity visible to others, and in more than a few cases the creativity works against the project in the long run. But I love it anyway... :)
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    No company allows you to be creative.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  My mom was an accountant, and I used to think that would be hell, just sitting in excel all day, tabulating endless columns of numbers... But really someone else must say exactly the same thing about my fully engrossing coding or sysadminning. For me it's building castles and engines, but to someone else it's just "sitting in front of an editor all day"

andrewl 3y ago

What is everybody’s opinion on Edsger Dijkstra’s quote “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” I’ve seen several version of Basic, but I’ve written only a a small bit of code in one of them, and that was 30 years ago. So I don’t know enough about the language to know what his objection was. The language I’ve programmed in the most is Ruby (also my favorite so far), and the one that interests me the most to look at next is probably Pharo. And I know Dijkstra did not like object-oriented languages, either.

nanolith 3y ago
I started writing software as a child, in the eighties. I only had access to various forms of BASIC and machine code. I switched to C in the early nineties, when I got access to Turbo C in middle school. Later, I got access to Minix, BSD, and Linux. I turned out fine. I'm a fan of Dijkstra, but it's best to take his opinions with an appropriate dose of salt. He liked to be provocative.
sowbug 3y ago
The version of BASIC I learned (Applesoft) had little support for functions and no concept of scoping. Every variable was global. GOSUB acted a little like a function, but barely (no function parameters, and without variable scoping a parameter is meaningless anyway). Without these features, it was very hard to write a program of any size without it becoming a mess. I wouldn't go so far as to say BASIC breaks your brain, but it is almost antithetical to structured programming, and eventually you need to learn structured programming if you plan to write maintainable code. There is also an argument against learning programming with languages that have no concept of a heap. I agree that a C pointer is a weird thing at first, and some people never get it. But I've softened my stance over the years. People can be productive coders without being bit twiddlers.
analog31 3y ago
I learned Dartmouth BASIC on a timeshare in 1981. Variable names are single letter, or a letter and a digit. All variables are global. No function headers. Branching by GOTO. It means that modularity and structure are virtually impossible. It practically forced you to write obfuscated code, and programs larger than a few dozen lines become exponentially harder to manage. Imagine the worst code you've ever seen. People who got good at coding in this way tended to develop mental habits that had to be un-learned when they moved to a more advanced language such as Pascal, as I did. With that said, beginners in any "scripting" language can evolve in the same way, if not taught some better habits. I've seen some Python programs that were as bad as my BASIC programs.

ianbicking 3y ago

Huh, for $15 you can buy a string add-on with things like LTRIM$, REPSTR$, etc... https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-handling-tk https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-hand...

LispSporks22 3y ago
I think Shen (fancy Lisp) has a similar model
schmudde 3y ago
For just $4 more you can buy the Atari ST version!

WoodenChair 3y ago

When I was 9 years old in 1996, my dad got me TrueBASIC. It was one of my first programming languages. And it was cool to be able to create programs that draw graphics and output executables. Something I hadn't done before. The manual was good enough to get started. I made some games over the next few years before I moved on to RealBASIC (now Xojo). Perhaps if there had been some kind of online community I would've taken it much further. At the time, I was not aware of QBasic or any of the other common similar BASICs. What I can tell you looking back is that it was a fine way to get started. We can debate whether it would still make sense to use something like this over Python for a modern 9-year-old. Certainly it's much more limited. But I will say there are just a lot fewer foot guns for a complete beginner. There's less surface area, so there is less to learn, but also less to do. I don't think that's such a bad tradeoff actually. Sometimes limitations actually spark imagination. And it's motivating to be able to learn all of something. But there are certainly free/open source BASICs that are just as good today. It's a legacy product.

AndrewOMartin 3y ago

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists. 1974 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964. https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...