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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that QBasic is so bad as procedural language.

All the primitives are there and I've never written any code with much GOTOs in them. Just did not feel the need even when I was 10 years old.

What this article clearly lacks is

    SCREEN 13

Seriously, unsurpassed easiness of programmable graphics. Even by javascript, which is otherwise better for teaching.

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Absolutely, this is what I miss, both for myself and for teaching youngsters. Not even Python or Javascript has an easy way to just get a full screen canvas that lets you set RGB colors onto pixels and draw shapes.

The python way is to import pygame and get mired in page flipping, creating canvases, creating your own event loop, etc.

The javascript way is to create an HTML5 canvas, learn how to get page elements and store them in a variable, and where to put your code so it will run at the right time, etc.

Both have so much scaffolding before you can just create some procedural graphics and begin to reason about x and y coordinates in a way that's fun and shows the power of programming visually.

My hobby with QBasic was making variations on Conway's Game of Life. So easy and fun in that language compared to anything else.

Have you looked at processing.js

http://processingjs.org/

You can put pixels on screen, draw lines using simple functions and later do 3d stuff in it...

Some screen modes[1] like screen 9 actually had page flipping as an option. You could write to the "back" screen buffer and then switch which buffer was shown. I used that to make a poor man's strobe light.

I really miss the simplicity of QBasic sometimes.

[1] http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/SCREEN_(statement)

Nice - I remember reading the GW-Basic manual alphabetically and wondering why none of the graphics commands worked until I got to 'SCREEN'

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