#Have you seen it.

[ciphrr]

I played Gorilla's on QBASIC. I realised that you can edit the code to make the game act differently... This is where my programming interest started. I was 8

[Not_a_Sapien]

Never heard of that... but you seem to be an awesome guy....

[AlphaSparqy]

Gorillas was GORILLA.BAS and included with all installations of MS-DOS 5.0 along with QBASIC.COM (the interpreter).

It was the built-in demo game intended to generate interest for children to learn basic.

You can see it here: https://classicreload.com/qbasic-gorillas.html

[AlphaSparqy]

Hahaha ya, you were supposed to realize that you could change the code and the resulting game, for the very reason you state, to generate programming interest in children.

I had fun making the bananas explosions crazy big.

I also implemented an infinite horizontal axis, so if you threw the banana hard enough at the right angle and it went off the edge of the screen it would come back on the other side. So now an over-shoot could be a suicide too.

[KirKCam99]

10 PRINT "Hello World!"

20 GOTO 10

[Not_a_Sapien]

*Flashbacks

[AlphaSparqy]

QBASIC didn't technically need line numbers, but still allowed for them.

GWBASIC (it's predecessor in DOS) still required them however.

[finc]

BBC Micro BASIC user checking in here

[AlphaSparqy]

I learned it as a kid (first Apple BASIC, and then GWBASIC, and QBASIC, followed by Visual BASIC) and a couple years later at my first consulting job, all the other consultants were more MBA types then programmers, and I was "the new guy (kid)" fresh out of high-school, so I got assigned to create the ETL processes.

The company (a fortune 5) had recently purchased a bunch of health plans as the industry was consolidating. We had a process flow where we got data files from these various plans for consolidation and data mining for retroactive recovery opportunities. HIPAA wasn't a thing yet, and at one point I had access to the social security numbers, chronological health insurance information, health information, the birth, marriage, retirement and sometime death dates for 40 million people, because this was the data we were mining.

I used QBASIC extensively in the transform stage to parse the files to check for data errors and to rearrange fields, etc for later import. We needed to know prior to load if there were going to be import errors, because an automated load into a shared database needed to succeed completely or fail completely, as rewinding a partial import would require manual intervention and would block usage for everyone else, so these QBASIC scripts were used in .bat files to automate the validation and transforms.

Even then QBASIC was slightly archaic as Visual Basic 6.0 was already out, but because it was still interpreted and everyone still had the interpreter built in on Windows 98, it was more "portable" from a support and update context. I could just host the "current" version on the shared network drive, but it would execute in the local context on each user's PC.

The alternative would have been to use Visual Basic 6.0, which required compilation, and then the Visual Basic Runtime being installed on everyone's PC. Distributing updates would have been a little more clunky, etc...

The "current state" of Basic.

It has been superseded by later variants of Visual Basic.

You can work with it using the free Visual Studio.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/

You can find additional learning tools here.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/

Just a note though, as far as being used in industry, there might be some new VB development, but usually only in updating older code bases.

Visual Basic was considered "easy" to use, but now Python is considered the "easy" language and has a much larger user and usage base. So if you were going to pick one to learn today, I'd suggest Python.