30 years later, QBasic is still the best
<i>&gt;to realize that in more than 30 years, we have not been able to come up with something better for our kids: Qbasic ..., but we have never really made a simpler or more direct access to the thrill of programming than QBasic. </i><p>First, I think it&#x27;s really cool that he&#x27;s exposing a young mind to programming.  But I&#x27;m also old enough to have installed QBasic from floppy disks and part of me thinks his statements I quoted are romanticizing QBasic a little bit.<p>I think that Javascript in today&#x27;s browser is a fine substitute.  I&#x27;ve had good experience with children that age by going to the browser, pressing F12, go to Console tab and start typing code.  It can start as simple as:<p><pre><code>  alert(&quot;hello world&quot;);
</code></pre>
And boom, you get a popup.  You can also show the kid he can type in arithmetic stuff like &quot;2+3&quot; and he&#x27;ll get back the answer 5.  You can then show him how to <i>modify</i> the existing web page.  You can ramp up a slight bit of complexity by showing how to create a text file and writing Javascript and then having the browser run it.  The 8-year olds I&#x27;ve seen can handle this no problem.<p>What I like about the Javascript-for-kids approach is that it shows them that programming isn&#x27;t some other universe where you install QBasic in a vm.  Instead, the initiation into programming&#x2F;experimentation is just 2 keystrokes away.  There&#x27;s something about the immediacy of F12-Javascript that keeps it from being an esoteric dark corner.  The kid can also get more mileage out of his &quot;programming&quot; knowledge because he can use his Javascript console tricks at his friend&#x27;s house on any web browser.  On the other hand, playing with QBasic today is more isolating.  The use of QBasic in 1980s had more utility because the syntax of &#x27;10 PRINT &quot;HELLO&quot;&#x27; also worked on Apple II, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc.