As someone who got their start with BASIC -- mainly from "BASIC Computer Games" no less -- I was always kind of offended at that quote.
It implies that Dijkstra was a terrible educator who could only truly teach blank minds. For all his imagination and creativity on theoretical CS and math, he was very rigid in other ways. Imagine a history professor saying that students who have been exposed to various myths and ideologies are mentally mutilated beyond hope, or a literature professor saying that students who have been exposed to pop culture retellings of the classics are mentally mutilated beyond hope.
Remember that Dijkstra looked down on anyone who wrote using word processors, because he thought any academic should be able to work out their argument in their head and just write it down. Eventually he came to even reject the mechanical typewriter.
Once you go to a "proper" programming language, there is nothing to "unlearn". The new approach is so obviously better! At the same time, having an interpreter up within 2 seconds of turning the computer one was AMAZING and got a lot of people interested in programming.
Much of the software world you see today was built by people who started with BASIC!
As for Dijkstra -- arrogance in computer science is measured in nanodijkstras.
That influx of people with the attitude of "I don't care how computers work, I just want to know enough to solve my problem" shifts the stereotypes around those language users and may erroneously put the fault of it onto the language itself. It certainly feels that way during hiring, where it seems like developers of vastly differing skill or aptitude tend to cluster heavily around certain "friendly" languages.
The fact that the first coding I did was mIRC scripting however should terrify everyone hahaha
well, as long as we aren't working on embedded code for pacemakers
in that case, we'll just skip to the first person in the stack of resumes who didn't start with basic
C64 BASIC was terrible even for its time. Due to licensing issues, its capabilities lagged behind those of other BASICs from home computers of the same era. Everything cool you could do with it was basically cheating: PEEK and POKE. As a child, this frustrated me to no end. Even my friend with his Speccy had access to a better BASIC.
And still... Pirates! was made with Commodore BASIC.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/41499/chopper-rescue/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUyebYD5UO0
C64 BASIC had to be a step back, but that's where the sales were to be made. For example, in Atari 800 BASIC variables were not limited to two characters.
C64 BASIC was really PET basic from ~1976, very close to Microsoft's Altair BASIC.
63999 F$ = "TOWN": PRINT "Saving "F$"...": PRINT "UNLOCK"F$: PRINT "SAVE"F$: PRINT "LOCK"F$: PRINT "DELETE/PIRATES/"F$: PRINT "SAVE/PIRATES/"F$: PRINT 27648 - ( PEEK (176) * 256 + PEEK (175))" bytes free": END
(The print strings actually have an embedded control-D / 0x04 so they're executed as commands rather than printed)
Been a kid at that time, I run into performance issues with the BASIC-only approach pretty quick. Sadly I had no good books about assembly or knew someone knowledgeable about it.
EDIT: To clarify BASIC Computer Games != 101 BASIC Computer Games (the original has more than the microcomputer version including CANAM and DOGS)
This is a later printing than what I have -- http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/101_BASIC_Computer_G...
% git clone https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games.git
Cloning into 'basic-computer-games'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 23002, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (1191/1191), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (542/542), done.
remote: Total 23002 (delta 645), reused 1083 (delta 633), pack-reused 21811
Receiving objects: 100% (23002/23002), 76.04 MiB | 5.75 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (11501/11501), done.
% cd basic-computer-games
Or, for a web server experience, in that directory:
% python -m http.server
--
EDIT: having looked at the repository, it is reimplementing the games from that book in various languages, including javascript hosted in a web page, so for a direct translation it is exactly what you are looking for. If you want the multi-player ones to be playable between remote players, you still have some work to do!
https://annarchive.com/files/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcompu...
also there's a link that has web based running versions of the game:
https://troypress.com/wp-content/uploads/user/js-basic/index...
If you don't know BASIC then you'll have a hard time following the spaghetti code that the original book has. Probably half of the BASIC programs from the original book are either actually broken, have bugs or don't work as intended. Of the people that contributed, they either included the bugs and bad logic, ported from someone else's port in another language (that included new bugs and kept the old ones) or wrote a different game entirely.
To create a truly verbatim port in as many lines as the original while fixing the original bugs (and making it readable) is quite time consuming.
(1) https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
In either case, without permission or a copyright exception (e.g., fair use) it is also a violation of the original copyright, either as a derivative work or a copy.
Translating ancient programs like this are unlikely to trigger a legal case, but I would not rule it out entirely in this day and age.
Eventually I got my VIC-20, then an Apple ][, then an Amiga.
Then I got into the mid-wave mod scene in 1998, and I realized I had the wrong compiler, but man, I just thought I couldn't follow directions right.
(Personally I grew up on the British early 1980s Usborne BASIC programming books, now wonderfully available at https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books . My copy of "Computer Battlegames" - which I'd arbitrarily picked in the bookshop over "Computer Spacegames" - was the closest to the classic "BASIC Computer Games", which I never came across - not sure if it was more a US thing.)
One of the variants of the Football (American football) game called "FTBALL" is particularly intriguing; you will notice that the playable team is Dartmouth. This game is traceable back to Dartmouth College, where and when BASIC was first developed by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was, as I recall, originally written by members of the Dartmouth football team as a way to have a bit of fun. The idea that someone who wasn't a scientist, engineer, or professional programmer could program a computer to some non-tech, non-business purpose was a huge mind blow at the time, and a major contributor to BASIC's enduring popularity.
Way back when copying these games from the book into a VIC-20 and C-64, along with a healthy dose of the 80's era computer magazine programs, were my introduction to programming. Having to convert between BASIC versions was part of the learning experience.
Play Basic Computer Games in the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377776 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Basic Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572761 - Sept 2021 (12 comments)
Updating “101 Basic Computer Games” for 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273866 - Feb 2021 (65 comments)
Basic Computer Games (ported to C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, VB.NET) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188324 - Feb 2021 (3 comments)
BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604142 - April 2019 (120 comments)
BASIC Computer Games (1978) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026063 - Feb 2015 (31 comments)
Atari Archives: BASIC Computer Games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200133 - Nov 2011 (23 comments)
BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866103 - Nov 2010 (36 comments)
You can try it out in your browser at: https://codepen.io/kgr/full/yLQyLjR
Just select the game you want to to run from the top-left list box, then press the "Compile" button and you'll see the translated JS source in the right text-area. Then press the "Run" button to run it.
The source code for the compiler is available at: https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3/tree/429f2fd2b4cef0e37996a...
Decimal BASIC is one such BASIC compiler that should be perfectly compatible with these types of books!
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/
If you love BASIC of all variations, come join us on discord at https://discord.gg/HQaDgJvbbJ
As I mentioned, I'm also impressed by the old Usborne books, therefore I also tried recently to create an illustrated JavaScript course in that style ... See here the first 30%:
2950 PRINT "TORPEDO TRACK:"
2960 LET X=X+X[1]
2970 LET Y=Y+X[2]
2980 IF X<.5 OR X >= 8.5 OR Y<.5 OR Y >= 8.5 THEN 3420
2990 LET V[4]=X
2991 LET V[5]=Y
2992 GOSUB 9000
_2950: Console.WriteLine("TORPEDO TRACK:");
_2960: X = X + _X[1];
_2970: Y = Y + _X[2];
_2980: if (X < .5 || X >= 8.5 || Y < .5 || Y >= 8.5) goto _3420;
_2990: _V[4] = X;
_2991: _V[5] = Y;
_2992: _9000();I think it could be pretty fun to dump a Raspberry Pi 8GB (with all software installed) and a keyboard in front of him and start programming small games. I'm sure there is a way to use game programming to teach from scratch. I just need to find an introduction book and adapt it with game programming examples.
But one issue is that kids today are getting used to things like Roblox so I'm not sure whether they would enjoy programming simpler games. I think a "graduating" project could be an Ultima-I spinoff, or some 2.5d engine such as Wolf3D's, but simpler.
Edit: The game titled "Word" is very similar to Wordle.
Though I played this as a kid, I learned some interesting anti-mechanics by writing an "automatic player", that I can still get the highest rating by systemically starving 3% of the population each year, and that there is no need to leave any food in store for the successor after your final turn, and that losing half of the population to plague is actually in your favor.
Testing a few files, and it choked. E.g when compiling http://www.vintage-basic.net/bcg/amazing.bas, I got these errors:
- Duplicated definition
- Array not dimensioned
Not versed with older BASICs which predated QB, so probably I'll try the modern implementations instead.
When Sean Astin used a variant of BASIC to crack a security door in the second season of Stranger Things, I even wrote a blog post about it. I was just so excited to see BASIC again "in the wild."