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Comment by orangethirty | Hacker News Reader

I just asked him the following question: Do you still program? I have always been incredibly interested to find that out.

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http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...

Oh thanks for posting that. It was pretty hard to search and find if someone had already asked that.

I was very surprised he said Basic.

Of course, he presume he doesn't do much hard core software engineering anymore, but I assumed that family was pretty much a thing of the past (and legacy code).

Gates has a long history with BASIC. It would, IMO, stand to reason that he would keep his hand in.

Gates founded Microsoft to sell a Basic interpreter. His company spent a lot of time keeping Basic as a core part of its line up long after it was considered passé. I suspect that Gates has some nostalgia for it.

Yeah, Microsoft really is the "BASIC company". From the early 8bit machines (did you know the Commodore 64 BASIC ROM is (c) Microsoft?) through qbasic and all the way up to visual basic and VBA...

Not just the Commodore; the Apple II, TRS-80, and MSX all used Microsoft's BASIC in one form or another. It shouldn't be any surprise at all that their dev tools continue to be rather well done (regardless of what you think of the platform they're on)

VB.Net is a completely different beast from older Visual Basic (up to VB6). It's still under active development as a first-class citizen on MS's .Net stack. It has iterators, generics, partial classes, anonymous types, lambdas, and other stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a BASIC.

There is "Small Basic" which is a bit more capable than the QBASIC of yore.

http://smallbasic.com/about.aspx

I'm pretty sure he meant VB. I don't think anybody programs in pure QBasic anymore.

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