None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the actual User Interface to many if not most consumer level machines of the age.
I don’t have a strong proposition for a specific language. QB64 is maybe the closest syntactically, but nothing lives up to the spirit of the originals that I am aware of. I was kind of hopeful I was going to get to the end of this and it was going to be a call for developers to work on a new, modern, humane programming language.
People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not, computers in the hands of most users are 99% untapped potential. It’s as if Prometheus give us fire, and we only ever used it to light cigarettes. Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself, that waste of life is a small death, and the blood is on our industry.
The first example shows a video-poker-like game implemented in 98 lines. You can get close to that with processing or lazarus-ide. Now try to do that so you can play on-line, using the browser, with multiple people at the same time, storing score, records, with login, a network of friends, authentication... You'll end up seeing that node developers and users are neither stupid nor conspiracists.
The majority of people have no interest in programming, no matter how humane a language were handed to them.
Watch a normal user use a computer sometime to do work without interjecting. They all do stupid repetitive tasks that take hours and should be easily automated.
Look how far people get with Excel with no programming knowledge. I have seen absolutely incredible spreadsheets that do remarkable things. The will is there, but we’ve kneecap them with awful tools, and then keep repeating but lie that they liked it.
I have a friend with zero background in programming who completely automated his “job” with Autohotkey. His entire work for the day ran in minutes and he just messed around the rest of the day, that underutilization is emblematic of the problem.
I make no claims, but I think you might find this interesting...
https://asciinema.org/a/SM9tZ2ZiJofikPRxHCQyqDvRY
Just published this in Hackage (Haskell), it is a very early version,so probably contain a lot of rough edges..
Commercial, but not that expensive. There is a demo you can try.
Free introduction book
I see no reason to progress toward the non-BASIC implementations until the modern BASIC equivalents have been accomplished as meaningfully as the originals.
Using FreeBASIC would be closer to the way it was universally at the fingertips of every single Apple II, TRS-80, and PET owner. Soon to be followed by Atari and Commodore 64.
I guess the only modern environments where we could replicate the experience would be something like running MicroPython on an Raspberry Pi 400.
Or the Swift Playgrounds (assuming an external keyboard).
Nothing yet exists that has the same properties: simplicity and automatic availability. JS wins on availability as it is present on almost every general purpose device via a web browser, but the syntax is not as human friendly as
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
This is the start
Print "Hello"
Goto the start
> I don’t have a strong proposition for a specific language.
> People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not,
There is no such language for current times, so the dream of reproducing the feeling BBC BASIC¹ in the days of yore because not only has the tech mover on but so have people's expectations. No one is going to be satisfied with those simple introductions as we were back then, so the barrier for entry is higher - the language and wider environment need to provide much more and make all that feel like the heady days of drawing random coloured dots in graphics mode 2 while, hiding all the complexity long enough to not put people off, while not limiting itself by hiding that complexity (making the complex more so, or even impossible) so that people give up when they discover they need to move to something else to get beyond a certain point⁴. And it needs to somehow compete with the rest of the world, gone are the days that you are sat in front of a disconnected computer with not much else to do but experiment and learn - it can't wait to be discovered it needs to drag people away from consuming and actively attract them to creating⁴. And we aren't just dealing with a bunch of nerds/geeks who speak at least a little English, anything like this these days needs to be embarrassingly easy to perfectly internationalise⁵, without breaking anything⁴. And it then has to get commonly accepted to become popular and therefore survive³. If you create a language/environment that manages all that⁴, then why not finish off your morning with breakfast at MILLYWAYS?!
[1] The best 8-bit basic, bar non. No silly-short naming limits, proper procedures and functions² rather than just GOTO & GOSUB, a built-in multi-pass assembler for if you got really adventurous, ...
[2] Well, there were significant limits compared to what we have now, but understandably so in such small power & memory.
[3] Not unlike how gods and belief work in Pratchett's Discworld.
[4] This is, of course, impossible.
[5] ref: “reflected and it’s very English syntax”, and it isn't nearly as simple as just swapping keywords out for local ones either.
> BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done,
I hate to break it to you but we were, at best, a subset of normal humans, in the eyes of the rest of the humans!
> Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself,
That is rather too dogmatic. I'm a dev-cum-DBA with decades of inexperience behind me, and I do many repetitive things that I've not yet automated. If you automate everything you do more than twice you end up automating things that you'll never use again after next week, and never actually do much beyond making and testing automations.
> that dream is dead
Going back to that: the general dream is dead IMO. We need to stop hoping to find the One True Path to lead people along. The dream can still exist in smaller parts though, if we accept multiple very different paths without disparaging any particular ones of them: people starting by automating Minecraft stuff, people starting by trying to make DayJob easier in Excel, people in learning settings using interative notebooks to explore in more detail, people who want to make Alexa tell a fart gag at an inappropriate time to embarrass gran, people adding interaction to a simple web page, ... No one language or environment can do all, or even a fraction of, the everythings that might work for some people.
I, like many others, unfortunately have no idea what to do about it, beyond pontificating as above and hoping that someone else comes up with some bright new ideas (or resurrects some forgotten old ones that were not fully realised/appreciated in their original frame).
This is a good point. Back in the 80s, learning on a BBC Micro for me was a lucky confluence of geek, machine, and time period.
Maybe the "geek" part is the most important part.
I loved the BBC Micro and am grateful to have had the opportunity then, but to be honest, I'd probably have discovered computers some other way anyway, and my life might not have been that different. It's probably similar for today's kids--- if they're programmer types, then they can use today's tools and get the same thing out of it. Maybe this particular dream is indeed accessible only to the geeks?
I learned to program a few years after these were popular (around 1991 or so), but a friend of my dad’s gifted me a bunch of them after he found out I was into computers. I was 8, and it changed my life.
They were magical to me. I didn’t even have access to a BASIC interpreter yet (I didn’t even know what that meant), but I read the intro to BASIC programming book and the computer games books so many times. I remember running to my parents room to tell them I could use PRINT to output to the screen. I would write programs by hand onto paper.
I remember a few months later going to my dad’s friend and asking, “ok, where do I type these programs in?” He gave me a copy of QBasic, and away I went.
I remember having to learn so much to get the games to work. I learned about different versions of BASIC, and how to convert things to work in my version. Taking bits of one game and combining them with others. Making my own.
My life has never been the same since.
This is where I feel sad for today's kids.
The pressure to make a great game was lower back then.
Programming felt like an amazing accomplishment very quickly.
Now, kids feel like they've accomplished very little, even though they're doing more with less code than we did during our generation.
Miss those days.
Are you observing kids feeling like this frequently? Where/how are they developing? I think there's a lot of enthusiasm in for example Roblox.
I haven’t observed that. My nephew has great fun building things in Scratch and is really happy with what he has made even though it’s not some triple A game. I had the exact same experience writing stuff in Basic and knowing it could never be like the Buck Rogers arcade machine I’d played.
10 PRINT "CHAZ WOZ ERE "
20 GOTO 10
In the UK one of the main retailers of 8bit computers was Boots the Chemist. This store is functionally equivalent to America's CVS or Walgreens (who know owns a big chunk of Boots). They would have all the computers on shelves hooked up to TVs. And of course, almost all computers of the day would boot into BASIC.
My Mum would leave me in Boots in front of the computers while she went around town for hours doing the shopping each week and I would happily learn programming, picking up new ideas from older teenagers who would be happy to show off their superior coding skills.
It would be three years until my parents could buy me a Spectrum of my own. In that time before I had my own, my Dad would pick up the occasional computer book from a second-hand store and I would read technical manuals and programming books cover-to-cover in my bedroom, having to imagine the output in my head.
Those were the days!
Anyone else remember the hex code dumps they had for entering/checking machine language programs? I still remember going thru 84 screens of the stuff to get an awesome monitor program with assembly/disassembly functionality!
Any other parents out there teaching their kids/teens/young adults to code?
I've always wondered if it was one of the most influential books, ever. It certainly influenced me!
The Commodore 64 sold the most systems but so many owners only played games on it that the manual probably wasn't the most influential book on BASIC.
Exempting system manuals, the BASIC Computer Games books were probably it.
- Update them with the minimal changes required to run on a modern-ish Microsoft(style) BASIC.
- Rewrite them in a modern beginner-friendly(ish) language like Python. (This seems to be what the author wants to do.)
- Create (hopefully) easy-to-understand JavaScript versions that can be run in a web browser.
- Create an compatible BASIC interpreter that can run them as-is in a web browser.
- Create modern-ish versions of the games with pixel graphics where appropriate.
- Create some new, simple but interesting and fun, modern-style games in a modern language/environment, to serve a similar purpose for current generations of computing enthusiasts and people who haven't discovered the fun of simple programming.
2. Something something Hacker News
3. Profit?
I remember typing a "lot" (I was somewhere in the 5-7 range at that point) of code from those (and other) books into our C64. I don't recall understanding most/any of what I wrote, but I think it got me sufficiently interested to keep me going until I got to an age that I actually understood what I was doing.
[update: I think I found them, they were by usborne and inexplicably are now free :D : https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books]
Even the manual of the machine only included a single hi-res mode example in an appendix, and dedicated one chapter to sprite handling, but that was it. Yes, I am still angry.
It introduced me to programming as well as many casino games like craps, blackjack, slot machines, video poker...
And then some summer jobs writing dBase III and FoxPro, some actual education, and here I am.
Those books absolutely set the tone and sparked that first interest.
To run Super Star Trek, this command line worked for me in Terminal:
~/Downloads/vintage-basic-1.0.3/bin/vintbas ~/Downloads/basic-computer-games-main/84_Super_Star_Trek/superstartrek.bas
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Advanced-Progra...
Hands down the best book from that era, it taught so many useful concepts in a very accessible way.
I’ve been looking for a similar resource to introduce my daughters.