Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?

Does Visual Basic .NET count? Because I still code in that with Visual Studio 2019.

I understand the arguments against BASIC, e.g., ingraining impractical paradigms, but I do wonder if I would have ever gotten so deep in without exposure to it. I doubt that I would have jumped directly into asm, c, or fortran as a child. Even Pascal was a major leap ahead and probably somewhat inapproachable without help.

Maybe that was only the case in the '70s and '80s. I'm sure that if I had Python as a kid, it would have been just as easy to experiment as it was with BASIC back then.

I learned to code from some indie version of basic on the internet called Liberty BASIC when I was 13. I used it for years because the people on the forums were so nice and basically held my hand through learning a lot of basic computer science and exposed me to the history of computing via recreated qbasic programs and games, etc.

I’m super grateful for little things like that. All those older people that were welcoming to me on those forums have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been thinking about them fondly while I build a compiler—something I wouldn’t have been able to do without them answering all my questions when I got stuck.

No, and I don't miss it because I don't feel like was actually "simpler" than what I use today. Almost anything I could have done easily in BASIC in 1992, I can do more easily in Python now. The exception might be drawing ASCII graphic games, but I don't have any desire to make such games today, and if I did, I could just learn how to use TCell or whatever.

Yes. The one called Python. No line numbers but a funny indentation system.

vb6

Yes. PowerBasic. Since the original developer has passed on (Bob Zale), I don't use it for new coding. However, I have an extensive existing code base. Very fast compiler, very small generated exe's, and very easy to work with. But, I don't see any progress in a 64-bit nor linux versions so I've switched to Python for such things.

In one of our solutions (about 75+ projects) we have a single VB.net project with just a few classes. Nobody has bothered to port it over because it never needed changes. So it sits there doing its thing. The funny thing is that it was converted from C# code, which was promptly lost, some ten years ago because we thought it would be easier for the dev unfamiliar with C#.

On a personal note, I collect vintage computers. I have too many and stopped counting at 50. So I do use BASIC in that sense.

Yes, but it’s called Javascript now.

I'm a curriculum developer and lead teacher training workshops. We still teach BASIC because one of the robotics platforms still in existence is the BoeBot from Parallax. It uses the BASIC Stamp. When I started, the rest of the team was only doing the BoeBot. I started learning microcontrollers with the BASIC Stamp and I forgot how restricting it is when you try to do much with it. I proposed we adopt the Parallax Shield bot which uses an Arduino as the brain instead of the BASIC Stamp. Leadership agreed.

It's actually more difficult to teach Arduino in a day or two and hope any of it sticks if the person you're training in coming in with zero programming background. BASIC is still an easy language for complete newbie to pick up in a short amount of time. The ease of learning comes at a cost later on though. I've encouraged teachers to start with BASIC if their students had no prior background or if they themselves feel overwhelmed by the wider pastures of the Arduino. I underscore that the time spent learning C++ in an Arduino context is a better investment than time spent mastering BASIC. BASIC is easy to learn for the purposes of the robot, but C++ can control the robot and allow you to branch out into countless other languages. I liken programming languages to spoken languages and learning C++ is like learning Latin. It may be obtuse and difficult at first, but once it clicks, you can easily slide into any number of other languages with ease.

I'm now not really beating the BASIC drum anymore, instead I talk up Python now that Parallax has released a bot built atop the micro:bit. It's limited in the amount of memory on board and python eats embedded memory for lunch. It's time well spent learning Python. It allows students to grow into "what's next" far easier. Kids that learn Python on something like this robot can easily write the same kind of code on a computer to have it do all sorts of things. Kids in camps that I've run (and students in my classroom years ago) love learning about the countless python libraries they can use. I casually point out "mouse" and they making "random mouse movement" scripts as a gag. I always "fall for it" each time. ("Oh no! What?! My mouse... it's jumping all over the place!!!" - met with giggles, high fives, raucous laughter, etc)

So, yeah, I actually still teach BASIC on occasion, but I'm more and more turning teachers into Python lovers and C++ for the Arduino.

Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. What a beauty.

Just on the Commander X16. The built-in interpreter is 100% backwards-compatible with the VIC-20 and C64.

I seem to remember that my ZX81 Basic allowed a computed "goto" statement, which my later Amstrad BASIC didn't. I mostly used it for type-ins from magazines. I also had a little dabble in machine code (nearly forty years later I still remember the opcode for Return is "C9") but the learning curve was too steep for me to do anything much. I still wonder whether given tutelage or encouragement in programming I could have got way more out of my computer as a child.

python is the new basic

Yes, a derivative called UniBasic (which is itself a derivative of Pick BASIC) but the system it's used with provides an additional set of extensions to the language. UniBasic + extensions results in a language referred to as Envision.

The last time I used BASIC was in 2001. QBASIC was <3

The last actual BASIC I wrote was in 1985.

I still write quite a few things in VBA. Most of this is for research or teaching purposes where I want to add a few things to Excel, but there is a surprising amount of demand from management consulting companies that want a front end or some sensitivity analysis added to a model that they have developed for a client.

I've been writing a toy BASIC interpreter for about the past ten years: https://www.youtube.com/user/ZXSpin/videos

I am just starting to teach my young kids to code. I haven't found a better solution than old fashion BASIC for that stage when you graduate from Scratch but aren't ready to onboard lot of the complexity of a Python or Racket yet. I love Python and Racket but for an 8 year old they still have a lot of background baggage vs the immediacy of BASIC.

A shocking amount of processes in the business world still depend on VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) running in Excel (and sometimes Access). It's actually a pretty nice RAD environment, as long as you're not going to scale beyond a team of one or two developers!

Not the BASIC with line numbers that you may be thinking of, but VBA in Microsoft Office apps is a descendant of Visual Basic, and is definitely still out there. I use it when writing scripts to parse content out of old Word docs.

Liberty BASIC. It's been around for nearly three decades, is very well documented, has excellent support, and is the closest you can get in modern times to the syntax of the original Dartmouth BASIC. So it easily appeals to the old-school crowd like me. But it also has over 300 commands or constants to keep up with modern operating systems and methods which allow for GUI design, event-driven applications, calling DLLs, playing media files, interacting with joysticks, displaying graphics, etc.

Sometimes. I use Xojo, the new name for REALbasic. It's a cross platform Basic compiler, that makes desktop apps for Windows, Mac & Linux (also iOS & Raspberry Pi). Sometimes it's the fastest way to prototype an idea - it works a lot like Visual Basic & Delphi did.

I've used it to make a business dashboard for my indie software business, a schedule estimating app using "evidence based" Monte Carlo methods, and I was working on a cross platform Micro.Blog client (inspired a lot by Tweetbot).

I don't but my dad does. IBM BASICA interpreter from the 80s. I setup DosBox to run it on Linux.

Not really, I dont have any real need to. BASIC holds a special place in my heart as it is where I started in 1979....ish. However, I have very little reason to use it now. There are better and more powerful options today.

I teach kids to program via an after school robotics club and Python is so much easier and more powerful than BASIC ever was.

Occasionally I get nostalgic and break out a BASIC and its fun for a bit but I quickly realize how clunky the language really is.

Yes, I use Liberty BASIC V4.5.1. I started programming for fun and relaxation when Sinclair Spectrums first appeared, then on to Commodore and Amstrad. Then it all died down a bit real work intervened and in the meantime BASICs got super complicated. My first reentry was to Visual BASIC uggg… Then I found Liberty, super easy BASIC control of Windows.

The scripting language used for developing Roku channels is BrightScript, which is based on BASIC syntax with some bits of other languages thrown in.

I work at a company that makes a niche ERP. The owner wrote the original in Basis International's BBX. Within the last ten years, the company ported the ERP to Java. But, we still use it as a code generator for our dao layer and half the views. Quarterly, I'll go in there to change the templates to improve our dao.

It gets the job done. Part of my reticence is ignorance. I might have a meaningful opinion if I were familiar with more than just println and single line if/else. I am glad I don't need to plan for line numbering in any other realm.

Erm, sorta. Does Atari BASIC count?

I ocassionaly use it, but mostly only for toy projects. All the basic code I write is pretty interpreter agnostic after moving from applebasic to msbasic in the 90s. It comes down to what is available on whatever platform I am playing with now.

The last thing I did in a BASIC dialect was VB.NET circa 2007-8 and was a service in a .NET webapp backend. At the time I was a EE with limited professional programming experience outside of small personal utilities. Like a lot of people I had first encountered BASIC with the Apple II in a school computer lab around 1995 and built some small text adventure games with it.

I echo the sentiment of proxybop; the ability to type things and see something happen is a powerful motivator in learning to code. As a lot of commenters point out, Python seems to have largely replaced BASIC as the "beginner" language to help teach folks. The REPL reinforces this, imo.

I code in BASIC all day, every day, developing an application with Xojo. (https://www.xojo.com/)

It has some issues, but it's still probably the best possible tool for making cross-platform desktop applications.

I really enjoy the expressive power and/or other features of Swift, Go, and a few other languages, but if I could write code in only one language it would be an object-oriented BASIC like Xojo.

Another point worth making is that there is no right or wrong language in many cases. If you enjoy programming in BASIC, or C, or SNOBOL, or bash, or Python, go knock yourself out. There's really no good excuse for language snobbery.

If you need to program in a particular language at your place of work, or you want to learn a language to compete for a job then that's a different matter. ;-)

I do code in BASIC a lot, but I admit to using my own compiler called Liberty BASIC so I am biased. I do see a lot of people complaining that BASIC isn't modern but this just isn't true today. There are many versions of BASIC and a lot of them do have modern structure and scoping and some even add object oriented features. Python isn't the new BASIC. BASIC is alive and well today.

Does VB.NET count? I code in that all the time but only because my employer makes me.

I still break out the QBasic once in a while. I have it in DosBox for when I get the itch. In AppleWin I toy with Applesoft Basic. I also play a bit with QB64 which is a modern QBasic clone.

Normally I write code in C# or Python though. C# is my main language and it's what puts food on my table.

Only if something really can't be done in excel natively -- and that gets more rare every year.

I wrote some on-printer programs in basic recently as it was the only thing the printers could run.

Yes.

XBASIC, QB64, and various BASICs specific to old computers I still use, like MBASIC on my Osborne 1.

Unfortunately I still have to do maintenance on ancient VB6 code. I'd rather not, and have been working to reimplement it in more modern environments, but you go to war with the budgets you have not the budgets you wish for.

We still do some development in .NET 3.5 VB (huge health care company). It rules and I love it. We do angular, node, c#, yadda yadda, also, but I will always return to my #1 (and first) love, BASIC.

Nah.

  (prog ()
   10 (print "hello") 
   20 (go 10))

I don't call myself a programmer at all but all my environmental dataloggers are programmed using CRBasic so yes I still write code in some form of BASIC if that counts.

I know there are still a lot of VB6 Apps in Small to Medium Business. And Visual FoxPro, which has a languages 99% similar to BASIC is still being used as well.

No, but hard to beat Classic ASP for simple web apps. I wrote a BASIC interpreter with built-in SQL that was very useful for scripting.

No, but I’ve jut seen kit of scientific gear (ADC module) that boasted about having examples in both fortran and basic to make integration easy.

Thirty+ years ago BASIC became a modern structured programming language, but so many people seem ignorant of this.

Nope!

Occasionally, in tiny basic running on an Arduino powered robot when teaching classes at our local Makerspace.

I have an app for my own use written in Purebasic. I occasionally recompile it to keep it up to date.

Still? I never have

I still use BASIC for writing DOS programs.

10 CODE IN BASIC

20 ???

30 GOSUB 10

40 PROFIT!

qbasic 4.5