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Comment by jessehorne | Hacker News Reader

I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvote this a thousand times I would.

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Thanks very much for this book reference. Our son (10yo) is learning to code and after quite a bit of research (and to my own huge surprise), I've pointed him to QBASIC (via DosBOX).

I'm just a hobbyist, and approaching 40, so maybe this is pure nostalgia. But I do think text adventures (especially writing one yourself) are still a great way to teach coding -- and the whole keyboard-centric paradigm of computing. As a side note, being a non-native speaker, I learned quite a bit of English with the legendary adventure games by Sierra and Al Lowe. Great teacher, extra credits for his quirky and naughty, but yet so intelligent humor, of course. :)

Currently we're going through a QBASIC tutorial by Ted Felix: http://tedfelix.com/qbasic/

I think it is really well thought out and structured; looks like a great "more traditional" introduction to programmer's way of reasoning for kids around 10-12. I also like the empathetic language the author is using -- he has clearly put some thought into how to explain things so that a 10-or-so year-old kid would understand it while reading on their own.

I am actually in the process of translating this tutorial to my language (Estonian). Most of it is already done, and I can confirm that our son is doing really well reading it and trying out the examples entirely on his own. The QBASIC IDE is IMO still really good due to the instant feedback the child gets while messing around with it.

The same author Ted Felix also has a follow-up about creating sprites in QBASIC: http://tedfelix.com/qbasic/sprites.html

Another great BASIC-based environment for children appears to be LowResNX: https://lowresnx.inutilis.com/

Haven't tested it out myself, but after we're done with the QBASIC book, we might move over to this one, actually. The manual looks great, might be quite accessible for a 10-12yo kid's self-study: https://lowresnx.inutilis.com/docs/manual.html

It is definitely strange to reach for BASIC as a teaching language in 2023. But, this is an argument that has been echoed on HN as well, today's popular languages do seem somewhat overkill for a child's first independent explorations. But, again, I am just a hobbyist, no intention to grow a programmer out of our son. I would actually just like to teach im thinking skills, and a way to have some intellecual fun.

Not on topic but your English is perfect. Indistinguishable from a native, at least in written form.

Oh, I don't recall anybody ever explicitly saying something like this to me. Makes me happy for sure, especially considering that I actually did not learn the English language at school back in the day; we had German. Many thanks!

Those Sierra adventures probably did have a considerable, even huge impact on my early encounters with the English language, though. Basically, it was "learning by typing" [1], so it must have greatly contributed to the grasp of grammar and spelling early on.

This is actually a reason why I still consider text adventures a great learning tool for children. The child is playing a game (or coding their own), but because it is so text-heavy, they also improve their language and writing skills, without even noticing it. Leisure Suit Larry style jokes are not a compulsory part of this syllabus, though. :)

1: "Ken sent me"! :) https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=JWlTR29stts

I started programming with QBASIC at about 10 years old, too, after randomly coming across a book called “Practise Your BASIC”. It’s a great book and Usborne recently released it for free: https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

For me TurboPascal set the standard for power and ease of learning. The IDE was fast and solid.

It would work if you were a newbie and grow with you as you got more advanced. The language manuals were well written and in places quite funny.

Compile time was ultra fast, and if you wanted to go deeper you could. (assembly).

I dont know of any popular IDE right now that is as complete and easy to use.

Is the FreePascal IDE essentially a clone of the TurboPascal IDE, or does it have any shortcomings?

It's a very close look-a-like and it works quite well in practice but the codebase is quite messy, with many things still being based on old MS-DOG and its quirks. Would need a ton of refactoring to make it more extensible on modern systems.

The QBASIC/QuickBASIC IDE was also quite good for its time. Either way, there's still nothing quite like it on modern systems. There are a few terminal text editors with intuitive TUI's and key bindings, but none of them provides the full IDE featureset and easy access to documentation that these tools had. (Hopefully we'll get there at some point. Perhaps by starting from the codebase of a modern GUI editor like lapce and providing a TUI frontend to expose the same features.)

The Ted Felix tutorial reminds me of the beginner's guide I got with my VIC-20 -- easy enough for a five-year-old (me) to read and follow, and it got me thinking of the kinds of programs I could build on my own.

This is exactly what happened to our son (10yo) as he went through the chapters. He would start seeing everything around him (and, particularly, in his Minecraft environment) in if-else statements, etc. It was quite fun to observe.

I remember the same thing and eventually seeing DarkBASIC in stores and PureBASIC on a few shelves as well in the 90s. I gravitated towards BlitzBasic because the developer (Mark Sibly) was genuinely interested and improving his system, forging a good community and making some cool looking stuff along the way. For years I wrote BB, B3D, and a few other dialects of BASIC for doing game-related and demo-related things.

I'm so excited about this because I first got interested in programming via the same book that was for some reason on a shelf in my primary school's computer room!!! They did show us basic computer literacy stuff which was already ahead of its time but no programming or anything like that.

I remember not really understanding at the time and then years later coming across Visual Basic and the name ringing a bell, and then I was off to the races! So much fun.

I found that book in a library as a kid -- or maybe a similar one, it's hard to remember now. I do recall typing in long listings from the book and then trying to "fix" the compile and runtime errors by randomly trying things.

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