I mostly read the article to find out what EndBASIC was. I don’t know if it will get many users but it looks like an incredibly fun project, so I was left wondering why the author felt the need to justify it. Of all the hobbies in the world, building a fun toy that anyone with a web browser and Internet connection can play with seems like one that’s pretty low on the ‘needs justifying list’.
a couple years back I was about to mess around with qbasic at the computer history museum (of course you can just run qbasic on your machine if you want to :) ), and one really great thing was the integrated help. You could just work on stuff “as-is”.
Granted, I think the scope of things those kinds of things need to cover is much smaller, but the lack of “just google it” as a reasonable answer really made some of the IDE-y features in tools need to carry their weight.
And of course there’s nice “flavor” to doing that sort of retro-y programming (see also stuff like Zachtronic games, or PICO-8).
I like… not having typos cause my stuff to break. but BASIC envs are still pretty awesome
i was sad when racket moved away from integrated help browser to “open the doc in a web browser”, though from a pragmatism standpoint it did make sense to not spend resources unnecessarily maintaining an in-ide browser.
So you’re having fun. I wouldn’t call that a waste.
I mostly read the article to find out what EndBASIC was. I don’t know if it will get many users but it looks like an incredibly fun project, so I was left wondering why the author felt the need to justify it. Of all the hobbies in the world, building a fun toy that anyone with a web browser and Internet connection can play with seems like one that’s pretty low on the ‘needs justifying list’.
a couple years back I was about to mess around with qbasic at the computer history museum (of course you can just run qbasic on your machine if you want to :) ), and one really great thing was the integrated help. You could just work on stuff “as-is”.
Granted, I think the scope of things those kinds of things need to cover is much smaller, but the lack of “just google it” as a reasonable answer really made some of the IDE-y features in tools need to carry their weight.
And of course there’s nice “flavor” to doing that sort of retro-y programming (see also stuff like Zachtronic games, or PICO-8).
I like… not having typos cause my stuff to break. but BASIC envs are still pretty awesome
i was sad when racket moved away from integrated help browser to “open the doc in a web browser”, though from a pragmatism standpoint it did make sense to not spend resources unnecessarily maintaining an in-ide browser.
“Time you enjoyed wasting wasn’t wasted.”
Creative endeavors are a valid form of self care. Keep hacking!
It’s not wasted, BASIC (or something very similar to it) will be back as the wheel turns.