Bring coding back to childhood
Posted by Francis | Posted in Development | Posted on 01-04-2009
Tags: Amstrad, Basic, Coding, Commodore, Commodore 64, Microsoft, Small Basic
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Ask your average coder when they started and a lot of the time they look back tearfully at the days of their childhood and they say “I used to code stuff in BASIC” or “it was my commodore 64 for me”. Myself included. I started on my Amstrad CPC 6128. It didn’t make me into a coder (and it probably didn’t for most of them out there, but it was the first), I didn’t really understand much when I was typing (sometimes it made the vaguest bit of sense), but at the end something happened, and it was magic!
Nowadays it is all Object Oriented, high level languages based on rapid development principles. Lovely, but where is the innocent fun? The 10 print “Hello” 20 goto 10? I was shown yesterday that it still exists. Microsoft have decided that we need these innocent, simple, low level, not very powerful languages.
Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Small Basic!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx
I actually have no idea how serious they want this to be. It is based on .NET so it could potentially be incredibly powerful. But it only has 15 keywords.
Keep the dream alive!