30 years later, QBasic is still the best (2016) | Hacker News Reader

30 years later, QBasic is still the best (2016)

nicolasbize.com

35 pointsmyth_drannon10 comments

Microsoft’s early dev tools were really top notch especially considering how much of the software still runs in the most popular PC operating system.

Not all of them, there is a reason why Borland ruled in the MS-DOS days.

QuickPascal wasn't that great versus Turbo Pascal, and Microsof C was the last MS-DOS compiler to get C++ support.

Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 was released in 1992, whereas Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS was already available in 1990.

Ah, and the Borland compilers came with Turbo Vision, there was nothing like that on Microsoft side for MS-DOS.

And then there was Watcom and High C++ with their MS-DOS extenders, also not available on Microsoft compilers.

And very much still alive: https://github.com/ianatha/bababasic/ and https://atha.io/blog/introducing-bababasic

QBasic gave me my start in PC programming when I was a freshman in high school. When I was younger, I learned to code on my Commodore 64. I loved QBasic so much I saved up every penny I could to buy the QuickBasic Compiler. One thing I missed from that era was how much documentation came with software. The book for it was HUGE! Tons of detailed code examples taught me so much.

Same here. I started with C64 basic as a kid and graduated to QBasic in HS.

I was also raised on QBasic. My friend and I created epic games such as School Blaster, Gorilla Grenades, Echo the Dolphin (not the same), BipBop, even our own version of Paint that supported undo and could save images to disk.

Sadly I lost the floppy containing our collection.

Qbasic was also my first language too. A friend and I spent the evening drawing a face on the screen then updating it so it moved back and forth. No formal training or anything, just childhood curiosity and experimentation. It is very approachable language for a novice.

Such things were also my start into programming (after finding and reading the GWBASIC manual twice). Later followed by Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic and much later by many other languages.

I've been wondering recently what the equivalent for today's kids would be (my children aren't that old yet, but the day will likely come). In terms of ubiquity and being able to immediately start, JavaScript would come close, but it's orders of magnitude more complex in my eyes. Perhaps things like Scratch or SmallBasic for trying out things on their own. But these days we also have ubiquitous documentation, tutorials and other things on the web, so basically everything is a lot more approachable than decades ago ...

See MakeCode: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode

It starts like Scratch but then can help kids transition from block-based to text-based programming (JavaScript or Python).

I grew up on QBasic

in adulthood I got to use turbo pascal and I wish I had a copy of that as a kid instead of QBasic

the language is as easy to pick up, far more capable (produce real exe files), more logical and the IDE is as good

real commercial software (games!) were written and sold on turbo pascal

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