Re: Small BASIC

2024-02-05T15:09:06-05:00

Never heard of it before today... I was surprised to see that it's been around for over a decade when I looked it up on Wikipedia. I was also surprised that you can write external libraries in C# and it can use them... that's sort of neat.

I can't say I'm a fan of the 'EndFor' syntax instead of the tried and true 'NEXT' though...

Statistics: Posted by Erik — Mon Feb 05, 2024 3:09 pm

Re: Small BASIC

2023-12-19T11:52:30-05:00

I tried it once years ago. Wasn't a fan, although I can see how it would be good for youths on newer systems.
I do favor BASIC 256 as a learning/testing language.
My favorite is probably Just Basic due to the simple programming lesson it provides.

Statistics: Posted by bongomeno — Tue Dec 19, 2023 11:52 am

Re: Small BASIC

2023-12-16T15:39:31-05:00

Oof... that's definitely not on my radar. I confused it with Small BASIC on Source Forge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/smallbasic/ -- I don't believe it to be related.) But this one seems very "new-Microsoft" in its approach and I don't understand what they're trying to do. Let me take off my Confused Grumpy Old Man outfit and put on my Negative Nancy dress (don't worry, there will be plenty of Confused Grumpy Old Man too...)

On the one hand it's meant to help people move from "brick programming" to "text programming" but it tries to explain the fundamentals of programming, which they should already know about since they went through the "brick" interface.
Something like Scratch shields the programmer from spooky instruction names and having to remember which argument goes where... usually a complete and well-structured doc can fix it... but they created an auto-completion system to make up for it instead.
They're targeting kids but the doc is written like boring business PowerPoint presentations (where they insert those weird mascots everywhere, which I'm sure is going to turn off beginners above the age of 16.)
Their idea of "simplicity" is to reduce what can be done with the language (fewer keywords and built-in instructions) while they're aware simplicity comes from the language's predictability (for instance, how variables initialize to 0 rather than just allocating memory like C does.) They know that because they chose BASIC as a starting point.

Many people started programming with BASIC or even Pascal when they were kids, and they managed. Some continued to program and moved to more complex languages, others lost interest and stopped programming altogether. Ten years ago, it was said that everything would become brick-based and it was a great way to teach kids (again, it wasn't a problem in the 80s.) Now that they taught people not to remember instructions and where arguments go, they're trying to go back to text? I don't get it. Maybe they figured out they can't really provide something 100% flexible in a 100% controlled environment.

I remember watching a video of someone making the case that Microsoft spent half its time following fads, and the other half was dedicated to reverting the changes they introduced after the lackluster response from customers. Not to say brick-type interface is their responsibility, the problem I have is:

Another word you might hear is algorithm. It sounds complicated, but you probably already know what it means.

Do they even know who their target audience is?

It's one thing to design a language for a specific purpose, it's another to design a language for the sake of learning that language. I don't get it.

Statistics: Posted by MikeHawk — Sat Dec 16, 2023 3:39 pm

Small BASIC

2023-12-15T17:22:24-05:00

Anyone fool around here much? https://smallbasic-publicwebsite.azurewebsites.net/

Statistics: Posted by buddpaul — Fri Dec 15, 2023 5:22 pm

Pete's QBASIC Site

Re: Small BASIC

Re: Small BASIC

Re: Small BASIC

Small BASIC