I learned to program in 2004 in QBasic, although I very rarely fire it up anymore. By then it was not considered a "serious" language and we all knew it. But that meant the stakes were a lot lower. It's a lot of newbies and a few old-timers who do things for fun. This makes things a lot less intimidating for the non-coder. There are no conferences, no corporate sponsors, no polarizing big-shot Twitter personalities. It's a realm surprisingly insulated from the pissing contest of modern engineering culture and technical progress, where things that are acknowledged to be easy in other languages are nonetheless praised as impressive when done in QBasic.

Another thing is that QBasic has no decent library functionality for code reuse (QB4.5 has a linker but no one knows how to use it). This means people constantly reinvent the wheel, and they aren't told not to. People copy and paste snippets of code and learn how they work, but they don't build ever more complex mashups every year. Thus, you're not on the framework treadmill or starting 5 years behind the curve. Things are done simply and idiosyncratically, pretty much the same way they were done in 1995 or 1988.

Makes me nostalgic just thinking about it.

If I could go back in time I would have stuck with QBasic for at least another five years before moving to C. I wasn't close to ready for the briefly exciting dive into "real" coding, which led to abstract CS concepts, the thick books with exciting illustrations on the covers, the CS classes which were so boring. Meanwhile I believe I could have actually been shipping software had I stuck with QB. Gar to admit but true.

To me it looks like a lot of hobbyists here started their dabblings with QB until web development (read: PHP) took over.

It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you'd grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an excellent educational tool, an excellent way to get kids "hooked" into "real programming".

Learning programming today isn't quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There's no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods.

This market did not go away. I don't quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.

I rediscovered it as a teenager in highschool and wound up making a basic platform game with a mess of shitty spaghetti code goto statements and drawing lines on the screen. It was great. My dad wanted to encourage me but didn't know how, so he got me a C++ book from the library but it just made no sense and I couldn't get anywhere.

Fast forward to being 23 and deciding what to major in at University. I rediscovered the idea of programming and instantly fell back in love with it. I remember blowing through the entire first semester textbook in 2 weeks and really getting it. It felt like a super power had finally been unlocked. Still does.

I was so glad to reconnect with programming. I always feel I would have been an absolute whizz kid by now if I had really picked it up when I was a teenager and part of me is a little sad about that.

QBasic might not have been the greatest language, but it had a pretty sweet IDE, fantastic live documentation, and was really just fun to play with. I feel like there ought to be a packaged up Python distribution with the same kind of attributes, but I've never really seen anything that really aced that spot the same way.

I think in a way it’s a shame that kids now first see visuals rather than code.

There’s something much more thrilling about seeing a bunch of written instructions become a game, than some sprites that already look a lot like the game start moving about.

Another awesome QBASIC feature - the help section taught you everything you ever needed to know to learn every feature.

One of the best things I remember about QBasic is the help system (also referred to in the article). This where I found everything I wanted to know, including examples, about the language. I believe that's one of the reasons why I'm still more patient when it comes to studying software documentation compared to the average programmer.

If you want to teach a visual person like myself programming and the programming environment requires more than one statement to put something on the screen (including import statements), it has already lost to QBasic.