Hello everyone, next school year, I’m going to learn BASIC (Programing language) in school. Is there anything important I should know beforehand?
I think they’ll tell ya soon enough.
well, it’s a pretty basic and easy programming language
It’s all in the name.
i bet after you learn BASIC you’ll learn ADVANCED
ha,i’m hilarious
Boooo… throws tomatoes
Nothing really needed to know before hand. It wouldn’t hurt to read up on it now, so you’ll be well prepared for next year!
Make sure your math and logic skills are pretty good. They’ll teach you a lot though.
Oh, and compared to other languages it’s… Basic and easy. lol
Thanks! Also, is it true that BASIC is kind of like a stepping stone for other programing languages?
You are the most hilarious person ever.
It can be, but not a very big one for most people. For some one who doesn’t know how to program at all, I could see it being beneficial. For most people who consider them advanced computer users, you might get 1 or 2 things out of it.
ALSO what flavor of basic? Most schools use qBasic, (if it is make sure your program uses the sound command for debugging)
I’m totally not a M$ fan but I do think their VisualBasic language (esp with the .Net framework) is quite beneficial as a teaching language… makes me wonder why they would opt for vanilla BASIC.
One thing that’s more of an intellisense-friendly (suggests things to you) coding language, though even more useless than BASIC, is called SmallBasic.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx
Some pretty similar concepts to BASIC, but when you start typing it will suggest things to add in and stay syntactically correct, as well as providing a little description of what each thing does. So far the most advanced thing I’ve seen from Small BASIC is a painting program, so don’t expect anything huge.
qBasic is the shit!
I still have my OOOOLLLLDDDDD laptop somewhere (50mb HDD, few Mhz processor 4mb RAM or something like that) which I used to use all the time for qBasic.
Visual basic is simple, it is like programming in English
If BlackMesaReleased = True Then
DownloadBlackMesa()
End IfBecause it’s good to learn to program in the most simple way possible. If you need to teach someone what a variable is, and how executing a program ‘walks’ through each line of code, you really don’t need all kinds of objects & events to confuse people. 
For me it was very beneficial to learn about variables, ‘if’ statements, ‘for’ loops, ‘while’ loops, etc. before I moved on to programming in a graphical environment. I learned programming in AmigaBASIC and then moved on to QBASIC and finally to Visual Basic. I think that’s a great way to go.
By the way, after that I also learned to program in Pascal & Delphi and took an extended course in OOP C++. And after learning all this, I’ve settled on writing webapplications in PHP and most likely I’ll look for a completely different job alltogether in the near future (oh the irony!).
I admit I’m sort of a novice programmer, but I honestly wonder how people program in environments without intellisense, like plain text editors.
Text editor:
ConnectionObj co = new ConnectionObj();
co.IsRebuffed = True;
co.Initialize(params, “Initializing…”);
Hey Katana, it should be connectionObj, not co.
Oh.
Find>Replace ‘co’ with ‘connectionObj’
Also, it’s ‘isRebuffed’ not ‘IsRebuffed’.
Oh.
Visual Studio: [what I actually type]
Conn-[press down, enter] co = new [down,enter];
co.is[down a few times, enter] = Tr[enter];
co.Inenter;
Hey Katana, it should be connectionObj.
Oh. Okay. (right-click any instance, Refactor->Rename, only affects scope instances)
For the record, the Visual Studio environment is mostly free through the Express versions, plus anyone who has touched a school with their pinky finger at some point in their life can probably get a free version either through their school or Microsoft’s many academic programs.
I program all my HTML/CSS and PHP in wordpad.
Loading up an editor with syntax highlighting takes too long (Yes, it’s only a few seconds, but wordpad takes <1 second to open)
Ooooh, BASIC. Scary, scary… you’re basically screwed, dude; keep an eye on your ass and note the point at which it tears you a new one.
In all seriousness, why? Do yourself a favor and learn C++.
I think we can all agree that C++ is where it’s at 
Well I’ve never learned a programing language before, and I needed something to fill up my school schedule, and BASIC was available. Besides, after I finish basic, I’ll probably move onto C++.
I started programming with a nifty ‘game’ made by Interplay called Learn to Program BASIC. Basically, it had this little dude that had a cd for a head explain everything about variables and loops and the basic stuff like that, and it even had the Hello World tutorial thrown in there. Unfortunately, programs could only be run inside the editor, no executables or fullscreen stuff could be done. Still, it was an excellent learning tool, it told you all the stuff you did wrong and such.
After that, I moved on to darkBasic, which is still BASIC I suppose, but it’s quite a bit more advanced. It uses the same pseudo language as BASIC, but it has all sorts of 3D capability (primitives, models, textures, lights, camera, etc.). It was a huge step up. I don’t have much experience with other editors, but darkBasic Professional had a massive syntax library describing what all the commands do and how to use them, as well as the editor highlighting variable names, subroutine names, numerical values, and commands all in different colors. It also made a list of all your current variables and their values / strings. Pretty decent. Simple .exe creation too