4 ms·
> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I di
by sksrbWgbfK 1y ago
> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time
For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid...
As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.
- 90s_dev 1y agoTic80 is great but Pico8 is better if you can afford it. And yeah, for a while I avoided strings in QBasic because I didn't have any clue how thread or yarn or whatever had anything to do with writing programs.
- Sharlin 1y agoI remember being confused why the Pascal/Delphi fractional numbers were called Single, Double, and Real. Like what did those words have to do with being able to use the decimal point?
- EvanAnderson 1y agoSharing fun kid computer misconceptions: I used a version of BASIC on my father's accounting computer that had an error message which included the word "ILLEGAL" (I forget what it was, exactly). I always assumed it had something to do with tax laws and the computer warning you not to break them.
- 3036e4 1y agoIn what ways? I paid for both, but I only use TIC-80 since I prefer open source and it has a FreeBSD port. I am also not sure if PICO8 supports alternative languages like Fennel or Janet as well as TIC-80 does?
- 90s_dev 1y agoThere's just something more polished, aesthetic and functional about the choice of limitations pico8 offers, whereas tic80 encourages decision paralysis.
- asveikau 1y agoI remember being a kid and seeing BASIC in a book from the library and not understanding how to run it. I thought maybe if you saved it in a file with the right extension it would just run. Eventually I figured out how to use the interpreter.
- xnorswap 1y agoYou've reminded me of how I near bricked the family 386 because I wanted to more easily play GORILLAS.BAS. I was quite used to loading it up in QBASIC.EXE and then executing it to play. But I wanted to just run it by opening the file in DOSSHELL. I knew Windows (possibly just DOSSHELL?) had the concept of file associations, so there I went reassociating things in ways I thought might get .BAS to "just run". It didn't work to get gorillas working, and in the process it seemed to mess up a bunch of other things. This was very late for still using a 386, I think our friends had pentiums by this point. I don't know if my Dad realised what I'd done and kept quiet about it, or just didn't realise how I'd been fiddling with those settings, but I think the extra "things seem wonky" was a nice excuse for us to finally get upgraded into the windows 95 and CD-ROM era.
- bestham 1y agoThen you learned your mistake and assumed that nibbles in FastTrackerII was coded into a module. Computers are hard.
- agumonkey 1y agoIt's a testimony of Turbo Pascal team.. the things was so lean and swift, compilation was near transparent. All this on early pentium and old cpus..
- charlieyu1 1y agoI liked Turbo Pascal when I was young. Debugger just works. Peeking into variables just works. Unfortunately, now I used print to debug for other languages because I thought debugger is too hard to setup
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoThat's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.
- 3036e4 1y agoNot with the files saved from GW-BASIC though, unless you add the extra A parameter to save as ASCII. I learned that recently when setting up a repo to experiment with GW-BASIC 1.0 (unlike the later Microsoft BASICs the original GW-BASIC is open source). Annoying when saving the BAS files as ASCII they are still written as full blocks of some size 512 bytes?) with a ctrl-Z EOF to mark the end of the file. So there is some random binary garbage at the end of the file to strip away before committing changes. I wonder how common it was for DOS software to do that and how much sensitive information can be found at the end of released files if you look after the EOF marker?
- layer8 1y agoThis reminds me of the story of an office clerk who after using Excel for a year or two was amazed to learn that it could do calculations and wasn’t just a “tables” program.