Share QBasic or It Dies
via reddit
Pete’s QBASIC / QuickBasic Site has a beautiful section on the “QB Philosophy or Why we still program in QB.“. I didn’t read through all of the personal stories, but just in the first dozen there were some that hit home. I’m also fascinated by how many include stories about parent and child programming together — now, that’s something you don’t hear about like you should.
I think Flash/ActionScript could almost be the next QB… but maybe AS2/3 have gone too far beyond? What if someone made a QBasic interpreter that ran in Flash and thus was trivially shareable on the web? I guess this would be like a fancier version of the C64 Emulator that’s been written in AS3. Hmm… somebody get on that!
FWIW, I just started porting a simple Curses emulator to Flash AS3 (see my website link) — I could see it allowing for old QBasic type apps to be ported.
–clint
I love that it’s so easy to get started with Basic. Actionscript 3 has moved towards a more static, more verbose language, but the graphics libraries in Flash are still nice and easy to use. If I were still 12, being able to put things on the web would make programming much more interesting than something that only I could see.