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I don't miss BASIC as a simple production language, I miss it as a simple first language. (Sorry if I didn't make that clear in my earlier post.) We often creat
by RyanMcGreal 14y ago
I don't miss BASIC as a simple production language, I miss it as a simple first language. (Sorry if I didn't make that clear in my earlier post.) We often create sandboxes with most of the complexity abstracted away for people to get their first introduction to a complex system, and BASIC filled this role nicely 30 years ago.
I'm not saying we need to bring BASIC back, but rather that we need a first language that is as simple to learn and use as BASIC was.
After all, the metaphor of putting things into a rectangle using x and y coordinates is no different from the way we position elements on a web page today.
- joezydeco 14y agoAnd I'm saying bring it back. Perhaps we just need to admit that BASIC is perfect for this task instead of inventing a whole new language. Are we as a group ashamed to admit that this language, clumsy at it was, was a perfectly usable gateway to bigger things?
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoBASIC has some deeply aggravating misfeatures and missing features that would be easy to fix without significantly expanding the scope of the language, e.g. better data types like native lists and dicts, and easier support for functions and procedure calls (fixed IIRC in QBASIC).
- joezydeco 14y agoDo we really need lists, dicts, and funcs to let a 10 year-old kid do this? 50 PRINT "Ryan McGreal" 80 PRINT "is Awesome"
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoNo, but BASIC would make a better gateway drug to more powerful languages if it allowed kids to get exposed to those things.