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Comment by vijayer | Hacker News Reader

Hey all, creator of Small Basic here. I made this back in 2008 as a side project when I used to work at Microsoft. My belief was/is that you can get more kids interested in programming when the IDE (language + runtime + libraries) encourages iterative coding with simple gratification loops built in.

You can see a bunch of decisions influenced by .Net which I was working with back then. I had been meaning to go back and revisit some of those decisions, but haven't had a chance yet. I have changed my stance around scoping and argument passing in functions, for instance.

(What is really neat is that 15 years later, my son is learning coding with Small Basic. And I hired an engineer for my current startup who had started coding with Small Basic as a kid in Brazil.)

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In the 1980s, home computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 booted straight into a programming environment, often BASIC. Even if you just wanted to play games, you got some mandatory exposure to coding.

I think it would be great if there was a modern "console computer" like that, which let you code the instant you switched it on.

At the very least, I wish modern programming environments let you use graphics and draw right away without fumbling around with boilerplate, like a simple 10 LINE(1,1,10,10) :)

C64 was even Microsoft BASIC.

Yep. C64 basic was my gateway into programming. I typed in almost all of my games from Compute and Compute's Gazette. That was until I joined a C64 user group and started getting pirated stuff.

Nice to hear from you, great work! As a lifelong dev who started by learning BASICA and who's first pro job was in Visual Basic, I love your thesis.

Nowadays I work with people living with disabilities and I come across kids who want to program but who cannot use a traditional keyboard and mouse. I was just discussing the need for a simplified ide and language syntax with full programming power and Small Basic came to mind.

Any chance this work will see new life outside of its 'side project' status?

As with anything, there was a long list of work that I never got around to mostly because life happened - kids, startups, etc. I would love to bring Small Basic to the browser where it's easy to share your programs and creations with your friends. I continue to maintain the webservices needed for the app, but any substantial investment is at least a year out unfortunately.

Is there a Windows client front end ide rather than a browser?

It's much easier to enable alternative input from say a .Net Framework WPF app...

I took SB to the next level in Small visual Basic. Its source code is published, and it consists of 7 WPF (VB .NET) projects, so you can fork the language and modify the form designer and code editor as you like: https://github.com/VBAndCs/sVB-Small-Visual-Basic

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