[HN Gopher] QuickBasic64: Basic for the Modern Era
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QuickBasic64: Basic for the Modern Era
Author : daitangio
Score : 74 points
Date : 2020-07-03 08:37 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.qb64.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.qb64.org)
| graton wrote:
| Ah good memories. Once BASIC got rid of requiring line numbers
| and supporting function calls it really wasn't too bad of a
| language from what I remember.
|
| I started out with TRS-80 BASIC, then assembly language on the
| TRS-80, then using BASIC on the PC, and then assembly language on
| the PC. After that was C.
|
| But I still have fond memories of BASIC as my first programming
| language.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Basic was also my first introducing to programming. And
| nowadays i still think its probably the best language to teach
| programming. I don't think it should be used to create
| professional programs, as its pretty limited for that, and
| doing modifications to turn into an able environment for this
| would only create a creepy language, inflicting misery in
| people that have to maintain large codebases of such a thing.
|
| What i really want to point out, is that, if you look into
| Basic for what it shines, i think things like "GOTO line" are
| very good, because it teach you how the computer works under
| the hood (the native code will point to memory, stack,
| registers, program offset, call hard defined OS syscalls,
| etc..)
|
| You could deal with the soft/logical and hard/physical
| paradigms at the same time, understanding that the logical ones
| are built through abstractions over the hard ones.
|
| Later if you decide to code, than you can choose if you
| want/can be spoiled and use more abstract and easy languages
| like Python or Javascript, but also with a good
| understanding/intuition of how things work under the hood.
|
| And all of this can be done in a easy way, like with jumps to a
| giving code position. (It alsos teach you to think over
| indirections).
|
| The basic GOTOS and other techniques might be bad for coding in
| real life, but im against taking them out of languages that can
| serve to teach programming to kids, and even creating more of
| this sort of instructions, that teach how to reason about code,
| where you can start with "bad practices" but that are pretty
| easy to use at a beginning level.
|
| Stupid little things like taking graphics and sound for granted
| and not having to import libraries, using things like 'CIRCLE'
| or 'BEEP' or 'GOTO 10' is what your eight year old self would
| think its pretty cool and would run to your parents to show
| them with confidence in yourself.
| cchance wrote:
| OMG QBASIC FLASHBACKS!!!!!!!!!
| ambyra wrote:
| I used to love this as a kid. The language is horrible though. A
| python version would be nice :)
| mysterydip wrote:
| If you're looking for "basic for the modern era", also check out
| freebasic and appgamekit studio, the latter of which is a
| descendant of darkbasic and the "tier 1" version uses a basic
| dialect. What made appgamekit better for me than qb64 or
| freebasic is the runtime debugging. While qb64 and freebasic
| compile down to native code, appgamekit uses bytecode in a vm,
| allowing you to use the same step, watch, breakpoint stuff as
| quickbasic of old.
| pjmlp wrote:
| _$NOPREFIX_ is an welcomed improvement.
|
| As for modern era, a though that crossed my mind a couple of
| times was having QB target WebAssembly as well. :)
|
| Porting those MS-DOS samples into a browser canvas.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Porting those MS-DOS samples into a browser canvas.
|
| I feel obligated to point out that https://copy.sh/v86/ has
| been able to do this for quite a while now. Of course, having a
| more native option is an extremely welcome improvement.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah I am aware of it, that was my point. :)
| amasad wrote:
| Based on pg's request[1] I've been working on a Basic and while I
| started with Classic Basic as I've been improving by dropping
| line numbers and currently adding labels I think I've reinvented
| QBasic!
|
| Anyways, here it is if you want to play with it:
|
| repl: https://repl.it/languages/basic
|
| docs: https://docs.repl.it/misc/basic
|
| some community programs: https://repl.it/talk/share?lang=basic
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1256526589300441093
| protomyth wrote:
| I actually taught QBasic for a 100-level class at a college. It
| was very interesting to see how close it actually was to the
| "grown-up" languages they used for the Comp Sci curriculum.
| nathell wrote:
| Does this mean I can finally run NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS
| natively on macOS?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Probably PureBasic, RealBasic, Xojo would have been an option,
| although with code having to be changed for them.
| daitangio wrote:
| Yes. Grlorillas is included and work well under ubuntu
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Funny to see this posted today. I was just listening to an
| interesting QB64 interview with a developer who recently
| published his QB64 game to Steam. It's episode 3, here:
|
| https://qb64.buzzsprout.com/
| darksaints wrote:
| This is interesting from a historical perspective, but honestly
| I'm really glad that the era of Basic is gone. Having had a
| handful of opportunities to work with legacy Basic code from a
| wide variety of programmers, it's just a disaster that always
| leads to unmaintainable garbage. I'm not even sure it is possible
| to have well architected Basic. Structuring and modularizing code
| is ridiculously difficult. The very principles of the language
| somehow lead to pervasive use of globals and gotos. It's neither
| functional, nor object oriented. Everything ends up as blocks of
| mutable procedures, tightly coupled, with red flags everywhere.
|
| I'm a very opinionated person about programming languages, and
| there are plenty of modern language trends that have been
| bothersome to me. But none of them will be ever as bad as any of
| the Basic code I have interacted with. I'd rather read and
| maintain code that went through a unicode-permitted Haskell code
| golf competition than anything written in Basic.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Were you dealing with BASIC or QuickBasic or VisualBasic?
|
| Also, consider that it may not be the language but the fact
| that most BASIC programmers tend not to know much about
| programming...?
| reaperducer wrote:
| I think that you were exposed to a limited subset of BASIC
| dialects. There were versions of BASIC that did all of those
| things and more.
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2010 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161656
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