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We take it for granted now with the prevalence and acceptance of interpreted languages like Python and Perl, but the radical accessibility of BASIC can't be over-emphasized. C, Pascal, FORTRAN, and friends all had a compile step which meant that you had to operate a text editor and command-line... BASIC was so much more immediate and straightforward to learn on.
The other great reason so many of us 40-somethings got our start on the BASIC-wielding micros was that our universe was pretty small and the simple things we could make our machines do were still fancy. These days it seems that you won't interest kids with anything short of a 40fps multiplayer battle royale game with millions of polygons on screen. Random number guessing games are lame, Dad.
The early web was a lot like the early micros -- you had to make your own entertainment as you quickly ran out of things to do, and the things you were able to make were comparable to the things built by well-founded teams. The opportunity to add something new and useful to the web is largely past, and any window is even smaller if you're not a venture-backed team.
Old man out. <mic drop>
The nice thing is that such beauties of interfaces are rediscovered by the younger generations. The rise of the REPL interface for python is a great example which makes this language feel a lot like BASIC on stereoids. And the notebook interface was kind of a game changer for open source scientific computing. Despite volunteered by some software from the 80s and 90s (thinking of the young Mathematica and Matlab GUIs), it is something which really got widespread nowadays, from my feeling. The distributed nature of these tools over the web is probably boosting this experience.
Furtheremore, the small joy for programming can always be around the corner. Take for instasnce
, its a small creative code environment. Or take
as a bigger ecosystem which made animations and svg really fun and easy with javascript.
> The early web was a lot like the early micros -- you had to make your own entertainment as you quickly ran out of things to do, and the things you were able to make were comparable to the things built by well-founded teams.
I'd never made this connection before but it seems both obvious and profound in retrospect. Thanks.
> Random number guessing games are lame, Dad.
Drawing a circle on the screen is still pretty cool for kids. Not like super cool, but qbasic is a lot more accessible than anything more modern (other than maybe scratch, but that's weird)
There was a thread about a month back where some of these points came out - where I shared the exact frustration you feel!
I think these days the interesting building blocks may have to be more "intelligent".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706571
Really with Javascript on a web page you can do the same thing, except there’s much more structure and power.
The Node's REPL is not very comfortable for creating and running snippets. The Basic environment has the magic LIST command that shows you the current state.
I think the Smalltalk environments with the object browsers were (and are) the ultimate fiddling environments.
You could even pass in the line number or range and the list command would only show that part of it.
I cut my teeth on C64 BASIC. I got one (a C64) for christmas 1984, the manual had several pages of sample programs that you could program (one ever had a mistake in it). By New Years day I had tried atleast 4 of them.
I'll be honest, I had more fun making making ASCII art that would endlessly scroll & loop thanks to a "GOTO 10" at the end of my creation.
If I'm even more honest, I find myself wishing for a GOTO command I could use in my bash scripts once in a blue moon. (I know they are a bad/horrible/lame crutch, but my brain seems to blank out any other options and just says to me: a GOTO would work perfect here.)
If it wasn't for a C64 and BASIC, I wouldn't have the career and love of technology that I still do [Checks calendar, HOLY FUCK] 36 years later.
I learned to program on a commodore 64 at age 7. There was a game were a gorilla threw an explosive banana on a city skyline. I think it was more a demo for the basic language than a game but it was awesome to 7 year old me when my dad let me use his work computer and play it. I learned that there was a file that controlled the game and it had easy to understand text in it like explosion_radius = 7. A few years later I wrote an "artificial intelligence" program that was just a few hundred if statements and input prompts on my dad's brand new 286. It asked you questions and then responded, carrying on a very basic conversation. Thanks basic (and dad)
Sounds like QBasic. C64 basic identifiers are limited to two characters.
I was so bad ass on this.