30 years later, QBasic is still the best

For young children, QBasic and goto may indeed be superior to more structured languages. From a neuro development perspective we know that young children are very concrete and have limited abstraction ability. With Basic and goto, a program is more concrete (you run a line which is more or less 1 command) and linear (no nested structures). With structured programming, it is more abstract, and has an recursive structure (with arbitrary levels of nesting). Because of this, it might be…

Oh, how many hours I spent in front of that TUI. QBasic was how programming should be. It's amazingly simple to understand (at the cost of ugly and somewhat verbose syntax). It doesn't force any mental burdens on you, and it included both a compiler and a interpreter, so you could run your programs instantly (with array out-of-bounds and overflow checking) and have a fast, compiled version. I wrote plenty of programs that worked the first time I ran them…

I have my tiny share of a QBasic Story. Please read this with a light heart and don’t judge me. I was introduced to Computers — as theories in school classes in the summer of 1992. By winter of 1993, my school got computers and I spent a lot of my time there, including many practices during the holidays. I spend extra effort to learn things that were not taught in the school. I learnt QBasic and started writing tiny…

Microsoft’s early dev tools were really top notch especially considering how much of the software still runs in the most popular PC operating system.