SmallBasic is Awesome.

There was a reddit thread about the ways we learned code as children, where we were lamenting that things had gotten much more complicated, and there was a very steep learning curve for people who didn’t know how to program. I commented that I wished someone would update QBasic for modern operating systems, and lo and behold, reddit delivered.

SmallBasic is a spiritual successor to the BASIC tools I played with in younger days. It’s essentially a small subset of Visual Basic tools that can be used to make extremely simple and well explained programs for windows. What’s interesting to me is how it is designed with teaching in mind, explaining everything that the user implements, and describing how to proceed as you type out lines. What really caught my attention was how advanced some of the programs could be. It’s apparently possible to write simple programs that download random wallpapers for you and set them as your desktop, or create small games with features like collision detection.

As a terrible terrible programmer, this has become another new favorite programs, so here’s to you SmallBasic.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx