When I was 9 years old in 1996, my dad got me TrueBASIC. It was one of my first programming languages. And it was cool to be able to create programs that draw graphics and output executables. Something I hadn't done before. The manual was good enough to get started. I made some games over the next few years before I moved on to RealBASIC (now Xojo). Perhaps if there had been some kind of online community I would've taken it much further. At the time, I was not aware of QBasic or any of the other common similar BASICs.<p>What I can tell you looking back is that it was a fine way to get started. We can debate whether it would still make sense to use something like this over Python for a modern 9-year-old. Certainly it's much more limited. But I will say there are just a lot fewer foot guns for a complete beginner. There's less surface area, so there is less to learn, but also less to do. I don't think that's such a bad tradeoff actually. Sometimes limitations actually spark imagination. And it's motivating to be able to learn all of something. But there are certainly free/open source BASICs that are just as good today. It's a legacy product.
A friend of mine was taught True Basic for a middle school programming class, and he really disliked that class (middle school is grades 6-8, for students about 11-14 years old). The next year they switched to teaching Python, and that frustrated him, because he thinks he would have maybe liked the class more with an easier programming language like that. This was in the early 2010s.<p>On the other hand, it's not like he ever pursued Python or any other programming language outside of class anytime after that, so it could he that he just wouldn't have liked programming anyway.<p>That's not to say True Basic is bad or anything. Some people tear their hair out over coding in C but enjoy other languages. It's just what came to mind for me when I read "True Basic".
Huh, for $15 you can buy a string add-on with things like LTRIM$, REPSTR$, etc... <a href="https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-handling-tk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.truebasic.com/products/p/tb-advanced-string-hand...</a>
What is everybody’s opinion on Edsger Dijkstra’s quote “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”<p>I’ve seen several version of Basic, but I’ve written only a a small bit of code in one of them, and that was 30 years ago. So I don’t know enough about the language to know what his objection was. The language I’ve programmed in the most is Ruby (also my favorite so far), and the one that interests me the most to look at next is probably Pharo. And I know Dijkstra did not like object-oriented languages, either.
1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.<p>1974 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.<p><a href="https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...</a>