[le-mark]

This is very cool. I've often wished I could return to my roots of simply programming, and not being a server admin and dba. Am I the only who wishes we could deploy things like BASIC applications to a runtime in the cloud and be done with all these layers of abstraction and incidental complexity?

[mwcampbell]

I get the nostalgia, but even though I started with BASIC (Applesoft BASIC as an 8-year-old in 1988), I wouldn't want to go back there. Structured, object-oriented, event-driven, and functional programming are all truly useful. Trying to choose the modern programming language with the least incidental complexity is enough IMO.

Furthermore, the UI facilities that early microcomputer BASICs provided would not be acceptable today. The graphics of the Apple II or QBASIC might be cool for a retro game, but you wouldn't want to develop a real application that way. For one thing, such applications were inaccessible to blind users with the primitive screen readers that existed back then, and today's screen readers would do no better. And a text UI with PRINT and INPUT would be accessible but even more retro. So even if you wrote an app in BASIC and deployed it to a cloud platform, you'd somehow have to use a modern platform like the Web for your UI. Unless, of course, you want to develop a retro game, and that might indeed be a fun side project.

[tabtab]

A web-based Apple Basic emulator can be found at:

http://www.calormen.com/jsbasic/

I taught some intro programming to my kid using this.

[tabtab]

Source-code to draw a hamburger:

   70 REM draw hamburger 

   80 HGR2:HCOLOR=5

   100 for t = 1 to 50 step 0.01

   140 x = Sin(Tan(t))

   160 y = Cos(t) 

   180 xp = (x * 50) + 150

   190 yp = (y * 50) + 100

   200 HPLOT xp, yp TO xp, yp

   300 next t

[le-mark]

Yeah, I meant web applications with the ease of developing and running a basic program of old. Sorry that wasn't clear.