Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jaybeavers 1125 days ago
Nice to hear from you, great work! As a lifelong dev who started by learning BASICA and who's first pro job was in Visual Basic, I love your thesis.

Nowadays I work with people living with disabilities and I come across kids who want to program but who cannot use a traditional keyboard and mouse. I was just discussing the need for a simplified ide and language syntax with full programming power and Small Basic came to mind.

Any chance this work will see new life outside of its 'side project' status?

2 comments

I took SB to the next level in Small visual Basic. Its source code is published, and it consists of 7 WPF (VB .NET) projects, so you can fork the language and modify the form designer and code editor as you like: https://github.com/VBAndCs/sVB-Small-Visual-Basic
As with anything, there was a long list of work that I never got around to mostly because life happened - kids, startups, etc. I would love to bring Small Basic to the browser where it's easy to share your programs and creations with your friends. I continue to maintain the webservices needed for the app, but any substantial investment is at least a year out unfortunately.
Is there a Windows client front end ide rather than a browser?

It's much easier to enable alternative input from say a .Net Framework WPF app...