
Microsoft Small Basic - Flemlord
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx?ppud=4
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mmaaxx
This totally isn't like Shoes by _why at all.

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psawaya
Do you mean hackety hack? I believe shoes was his GUI toolkit.

See: <http://vimeo.com/5047563>

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steveklabnik
To be fair, Hackety Hack is built with shoooes, so it's an easy mistake.

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calvin
The installer seems confused.

The first time, the installer installed the French version. I thought it might
be some kind of fluke or I'd missed the language option. I
redownloaded/uninstalled/reinstalled.

The second time, I had the Russian version.

Microsoft isn't making it easy for me to speak their language.

~~~
dmn001
It installs a dozen localised shortcuts as well as English, any of which may
pop up when you press the start button. Look in all programs in your start
menu to find the English version.

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romland
From screenshot:

    
    
      "Press  to stop game"
    

Funny how much sense that makes in a twisted way. I was thinking that they had
some kind of functionality that had you attach text to a keyboard event to
explain it. Alas.

    
    
      GraphicsWindow.DrawText(x, y + 320, "Press to stop game")
    

It's just a ... feature.

Edit: and the key they hooked up "stop game" to was not space, it was escape
:(

~~~
Groxx
I love when examples / high-visibility content has visible errors.

Another one, about v0.8:

    
    
      The eigth and newest installment of Small Basic...
    

Granted, "eighth" looks ugly too.

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ideamonk
Though I began with GW-BASIC on MSDOS 6.22 way back, but...

I would like to see a similar poster with a poor kid shown running linux on an
old donated PC (because he can't afford one that runs vista/7) and playing
with Python in bpython.

Doing much more than what he/she can do in Small Basic and learning something
which would actually get him some money in future if he/she goes in the right
track.

I wonder if this is case-sensitive too, I dont like the "To", "EndFor". The
title of the current script - "Tetris - Imported", is so confusing, I see no
tetris anywhere, all I see is something done to the poor turtle. I also wonder
what is the default direction of Mr. Turtle, I just can't guess what would be
drawn.

I would like the kid to know that he needs not know wtf is ".NET", teach
programming, don't advertize to them. Let them create their own .net if they
want to.

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kanwisher
Its in the right direction, I remember learning qbasic on dos it was a great
way to get started and then sadly I graduated to visual basic. Which was a
good place to start ;) I can't even read it these days but we all start
somewhere.

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zaphar
I started with gw-basic and remember thinking how awesome it was in qbasic
that I didn't have to use line numbers.

~~~
jrockway
Ironically, I think it would _improve_ software quality these days if you were
required to refactor your subroutine if you wanted to insert more than 9 lines
of code somewhere.

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chasingsparks
I like the nod to Logo in the first screenshot.

~~~
yurisagalov
Yes! My thoughts exactly! I had so much fun with that language as a kid
growing up

~~~
dmn001
Same, I remember playing that turtle game on a mac in primary school!

I think it is awesome that it is such a small download, and that you can
publish to the web too! :) <http://smallbasic.com/program/?FHZ097>

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epochwolf
Two things I noticed right away.

1\. The buttons on the ribbon are insanely large. Almost to the point I think
I would be annoyed with this back in 6th grade. (I'm not 6 years old!)

2\. The description of the move command is very technical. The same person
that is writing docs for MSDN should not be writing docs for kids.
(Seriously... "moves the turtle the specified distance")

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malkia
Okay, Apple ][ Basic was fun.

Especially with the semi-graphics, semi-text mode. Line here, line there - you
get the picture. I've got buddy back then who was able to write a whole BASIC
application that draws Michael Jackson (yes there was Take One back then, but
he wrote a 24kb code doing that).

Anyway... QBasic was fun too, and the MS-DOS one somewhat.

But this is not.

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jrockway
Anyone here actually have their first programming experiences with a "kid"
language? I know I started on regular "adult" BASIC, then moved on to C and
C++. No hand-holding anywhere, and I never found it to be too difficult.

So personally, I'm wondering what the value is here.

~~~
dangrover
My first programming experience was with this shareware Mac app called
GameMaker in the mid-90s. It let you make card-based adventure games. I ended
up meeting all these kids on AOL back then who also used the app.

I'm still in touch with a lot of them, and it's amazing how many have become
incredibly talented, successful, entrepreneurial folks (and we're all mostly
in our 20's now).

The interesting thing is that this app was probably the worst way to learn
programming. It didn't have operator precedence, functions, arrays, or many
other basic features. It was a toy language in the most pejorative sense of
the term -- not one carefully laid out for pedagogical purposes. I learned so
many bad habits.

But that didn't matter -- the real important bit is that we all learned how
_fun_ it is to _actually build stuff on your own_ and release it. I think
that's the critical spark that makes the rest happen.

So many people have never experienced this joy and spend their entire careers
only working on things other people have assigned to them.

~~~
robryan
Sounds similar to rm2k around 2000-2004. The language idea's sound similar and
it was all ui based programming where you selected commands off menus rather
than click them.

Part of the challenge though was overcoming the engine limitations as you
could only display 20 pictures at a time but you were able to use sprites as
images and change the sprite being displayed.

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nod
The thing that caught my eye was the big "Graduate" (to Visual Studio) button
right next to "Run".

Color me jaded.

~~~
rbanffy
The appropriate analogy would be unsuitable to the audience. SB is targeted at
kids. You shouldn't describe to a kid what the "graduation" really means.

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dandelany
Gotta love subroutines without explicit variables, causing comments like:

    
    
      ValidateMove()  ' in: ypos, xpos, h, moveDirection ret: invalidMove = 1 or -1 or 2 if move is invalid, otherwise 0
    

If I were a little kid, that would look like Greek to me.

~~~
barrkel
When I was a little kid, I wrote programs in Commodore 64 BASIC (a version of
early MS BASIC), and my subroutines couldn't even have names. GOSUB 1060 was
an example call, and if you wanted arguments, you put them into globals; and
you had two (count 'em, two) significant characters for your variable names.

~~~
rbanffy
I think the 8-bit BASIC maintains the abstraction level adequately close to
the real underlying hardware. What SB does is to make a machine that is
capable of things many orders of magnitude better and dumb down the
abstraction to match (to a certain degree) what was available on the desktop
computers of the 70's.

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sailormoon
I wonder if anyone has attempted doing anything like this for FP? All the
recent examples I've see are OO to the max.

