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Comment by PLenz | Hacker News Reader

I learned to code in isolation on QB back in the day - having interactive help right in the IDE was amazing in my pre-internet days. Later on I found the quickbasic version that let you compile executable (it may have been VB 1.0 IIRC) and from there on to FreeBasic (a qb compatible front end for GCC) and, well, here I am, doing this for a living from this.

I owe the great arc of my life to that program.

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> I learned to code in isolation on QB back in the day - having interactive help right in the IDE was amazing in my pre-internet days.

Hah, same for me. I had no peers who knew programming, only a buddy who mentioned QBasic after I stumbled upon a small BASIC program in a magazine.

I'd spend evenings just going through each successive keyword in the help, trying to figure out what they meant. Didn't help that we only started learning English in school at age 12, so lots of words I didn't understand at age 13.

On the positive side, I think this is what made me so good at reading and understanding documentation, a skill that's been incredibly valuable for me since.

I worked my way through a printed manual for GW-BASIC alphabetically, with no idea why the graphics keywords all failed until I got to SCREEN to change video modes!

Haha I love this! Brings back memories of learning stuff by trial and error. I remember poking around in DLL files with a text editor and trying to find ways to call the function names I could see inside them… never did succeed at that haha

> Later on I found the quickbasic version that let you compile executable (it may have been VB 1.0 IIRC)

Your memory betrays you: QuickBasic is the version with a compiler. QBasic lacked one, though.

I remember this feeling like a big deal for me back then.

Are you .exe cool, or just .bas cool?

(Or are you exotic-.com cool?)

oh man, that reminds me of typing .com programs from magazine listings into DEBUG.EXE

Keep in mind .COM wasn't really exotic back then. I remember many assembly tutorials taught how to write .COM executables. Many DOS era commands and utilities were .COM (well, they were commands after all!).

As for .BAS vs .EXE, I remember it was definitely about .EXE feeling "more real". I mean, I had the Basic interpreter in my computer anyway, and distributing programs wasn't in my mind, so a compiler wasn't really needed... it just felt that an .EXE program I could write was more "like the real deal"!

Assembly was absolutely exotic coming from QBasic & QuickBasic though. Moreso as the '90s progressed and writing .COM was seen more often in the dwindling number of applications requiring extra attention to system resources.

Agreed. I can't say I enjoyed learning assembly for x86. Basic was so much fun in comparison. Kids have it so much better these days with high level languages that can do pretty much anything without requiring arcane knowledge!

I was the same. I would download the games and then start messing around with the code/variables. By breaking things, I learned how they worked. Self taught myself to program via this meathod.

I still used QB4.5 occasionally to bash out a code idea just because it is so easy to get an idea down and running before moving it onto the real deal.

I am still upset that I threw out the hard drive with my side scrolling platforming game. It could do smooth scrolling like Mario on the NES but on a 486 33Mhz. Learning to split and address data sets as is needed would the game changer for me in gaining the speed up to what was needed.

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