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Lovely, it's like if LCARS and Pingus built a website together. No complaints here, it brings back a lot of good memories!
I took a deep dive into BASICs earlier this year and came away with some unexpected results. In software, these stood out:
- SmallBASIC ...wow this is quite an interesting set of tools, and I was impressed by ongoing developments. There are some faux-OOP convenience features even, like myfakeobject.value = 10
- QB64pe ...this really holds your hand and the documentation is great.
- To-try: https://wonkey-coders.github.io/
In discussions with developers, I was surprised to find some extremely intense, protective vibes. I'd consider "my BASIC == my childhood" a pretty reliable model. Simple how-to queries that would get ordinary answers in other languages usually brought out some defensive responses.
In group discussions there was also an interesting overlap between "strangely protective my past" and "prefers writing BASIC" that came up over and over while I was trying to figure out the overall ecosystem of languages.
For example, somebody wrote an algorithm example full of $ii $tk $zx and so on and I asked them about this (who knows, maybe there's some logical reason to not use my_variable_name for example) and the tone became very defensive, even insisting that maybe it was wrong but they are never going to change! Which didn't exactly have anything to do with what I was asking...
In the various online forums there was frequently an ongoing argument over who left, for what reasons, where they ended up, and are you a member of that forum, and so on.
Overall there was a surprising amount of interpersonal drama given the overall active surface area of this language. And a lot of emotionality that just isn't as prominent in other communities I experienced, even though it's probably there at some level.
Since I have spent a lot of professional time doing relationship work with techies, these things kind of wore me out pretty quick, and I found myself heading to some more modern languages just to get beyond the unaddressed, or unaddressable, feels-factor.
Still, I look forward to coding some more in the future and particularly in trying out some of the newer tools I discovered.
Well, this is timely! I've been looking into porting one of my favorite classic games, VGA Civil War Strategy, from QBasic to JS – just reached out to the current maintainer today about it.
I remember doing a lot of QBasic on the computers in high school and having a blast – first time I ever felt like I really knew what I was doing, and somehow it even made learning by trial and error feel especially rewarding.
https://github.com/Hutsell-Games/civil-war-strategy
https://classicreload.com/civil-war-strategy.html
https://hutsellgames.com/civil-war-strategy/
Ahhh, my first lines of code were BASIC <3
Btw, slightly related, if you want to do some BASIC from a Scala context, check this out: https://github.com/tpolecat/basic-dsl