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Comment by bexsella | Hacker News Reader

This is great! But it makes me think that Microsoft need to add a BASIC compiler as standard in all Windows distributions. They did that Small Basic thing a while back, but it was too encumbered in .NET-isms, a kind of Visual Basic .NET lite. It would be great if there was just a easy to understand BASIC that you could hack away with that could produce interesting programs without the .NET cruft or the barrier that is dealing with Windows APIs.

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It's too bad Microsoft QuickBASIC isn't a thing anymore. Who didn't love GORILLAS.BAS?

It was no DONKEY.BAS, that's for sure. :)

Yes! QuickBasic 4.5 was my jam! I used to churn out apps with that left and right.

I loved QuickBasic 4.5! It could compile programs to .EXE files ;)

And from there, once you hit QuickBasic's limitations, it was a small step to Turbo Pascal or Borland C!

It’s about time MS open sourced QuickBasic or at the very least released it as abandonware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)#QB64_Ver...

Old-timer geeky note: ah I think you meant QBasic? The Basic that was included in MS-DOS 5.0?

"QuickBasic" was the commercial compiler (like QuickC and QuickPascal), whereas "QBasic" was the stripped down IDE with interpreter that a Gorilla throwing bananas based on physics.

Memories.

Who did write GORILLAS.BAS?

It's a shame it disappeared before educators became serious about teaching kids to code as well. All my math text books from the late 80's and 90's came with code samples written in basic that teachers ignored and now kids have dedicated coding classes where the snap together if statements in a useless visual programming thing on their iPads. We missed the opportunity to teach programming in a way that was both immediately useful (took away the repetitive work) and integrated way with other classes. I wish I could go back in time and show my younger self what to do with those basic code samples while I was wasting time plotting some function on a piece of graph paper.

C# and .net core don't have as much cruft, and the simple dev environment in code or visual studio are invaluable - especially the debuggers which are imo one of the most important learning tools.

Argueably MS already provide a complete language pre-installed in PowerShell. However would be nice if they more of a beginners IDE for simple programming.

Powershell ISE is pre-installed.

The command-line C# compiler csc.exe is also pre-installed as part of the .NET Framework. There's also all the WSH languages (VBScript and JScript).

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