alt.hn

5/9/2026 at 11:55:29 AM

What if there was no BASIC in EndBASIC?

 https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/no-basic-in-endbasic

by rbanffy

5/13/2026 at 9:50:32 AM

> Even Visual Basic, a real platform that evolved over many years and gained “serious language features”, has fallen out of fashion

VB didn't fall out of fashion. Microsoft unceremoniously killed it and replaced it with VB.NET - a language nobody asked for. VB.NET has the verbosity of C# but with none of the benefits.

These days there's little incentive to learn VB because it's been dead for quarter of a century. And there's little point reviving it because anyone who wants a GUI will likely be working with web frameworks.

I did like VB, a lot. It was such a shame to see the abomination MS released with VB.NET. And that makes me all the more grateful that most languages these days are open. For example Perl 6 (now Raku) ended up taking a journey that fragmented the ecosystem, so dedicated and passionate Perl developers took on the mantel to continue the life of Perl 5

by hnlmorg

5/13/2026 at 1:00:36 PM

VB the ide was really good but VB the language was not. In particular it didn't support object orientation in any sensible way. While I am not crazy about object orientation in general, I think it is indispensable for UI development. I tried writing an application in Visual Basic. It was quick to start but the 5th time I had to copy the same code in yet another module, I switched to Visual C++. And anytime you needed to do something advanced with Win32, you had to resort to unnatural C like techniques in VB, while the same operation was native in Visual C++. This was 25 years ago and it was the last time I tried VB.

by asimeqi

5/13/2026 at 11:53:01 AM

I would be very glad of a VB style IDE which would make stand-alone HTML5 (or some more up-to-date equivalent)web apps

by WillAdams

5/13/2026 at 12:43:08 PM

Xojo might be what you want. Used to be REALBasic. They have long since reworked the compiler and it runs everywhere including Raspberry Pi and web.

by giancarlostoro

5/13/2026 at 12:26:16 PM

Not exactly what you’re asking for, but the closest I’ve found (asking the same question) so far: https://www.spiderbasic.com/

by mysterydip

5/13/2026 at 1:00:03 PM

May I say that the architecture is like this --

The VM is completely independent from the frontend. It also provides primitive functions interacting with the system, e.g. printing to console and drawing lines/circles, etc to different devices. It also implements an abstract VFS, which seems to be of a different concept comparing with the VFS in the kernel, because it is in user land. It is the frontend to tokenize and parse the language and call upon the VM to do something useful.

I think this is pretty common among compiler designs, except that most compilers don't implement drawing functions or user land file systems, while EndBASIC's does that -- if my assumption is correct. In essence it looks like a user land operating system.

by ferguess_k

5/13/2026 at 12:39:48 PM

Sounds like the real solution here is to make something like the JVM or .NET where you could still have BASIC and a less BASIC language.

But smaller than both.

by giancarlostoro

5/13/2026 at 9:27:26 AM

I'm In This Photo and I Don't Like It.

Wrote a basic interpreter in C/Wasm last year. Finished it, but in the end never posted it anywhere. While I started my dev journey with Basic as a child, I was quickly reminded why I moved to C as soon as I learned about it. Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project. I still enjoy C, sometimes ASM, but not basic anymore.

by canpan

5/13/2026 at 10:28:14 AM

> Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project.

I think it is an interesting teaching tool. It has a lot of limitations that place it close to the machine level - all variables being global, no real named functions, and so on. It grounds the expectations about what a computer can and can't do - all the fancy things we do are smoke and mirrors layered on top of a very simple machine.

by rbanffy

5/13/2026 at 10:34:13 AM

It is true, I did learn Basic (QBasic) first, as elementary school student, and C second. What made it particular good was the F1 help. I think it is still one of the best help systems I ever used. Good intro and F1 while pointing on any function and instant help, easy to understand. Additionally no complicated include and compiling. But at the same time, I think I could also teach simple C or JS to an elementary school student. It is just the help and runtime that is bad. Somehow still today there is no major language system that does all of this well. Curious...

by canpan

5/13/2026 at 11:11:38 AM

I’ve taught Python to primary school kids (which I think is the same age group as elementary school).

by hnlmorg

5/13/2026 at 7:59:37 AM

super interesting! wonder how hard it would be to make this a target for haxe, which has already solved a lot of the issues around designing a good cross-target language.

by zem