Do any BASIC dialects have a future that isn't just nostalgia for the early days of microcomputers? #BASIC #programming
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@profoundlynerdy I suppose it depends on what you consider "just nostalgia". I've seen a lot of projects using variants of TinyBASIC to enable interactive programming directly on microcontrollers. Self-hosted interactive programming is an area MicroPython and pretty much all other microcontroller software seems to neglect.
This project is a good example: https://github.com/Stan6314/TinyBasRV/tree/main
@freakazoid That's good to know. I would say not to neglect #Forth as an option to scratch the interactive programming itch. Sadly, not a lot of devs are aware of Forth's existence.
I didn't know people were porting BASIC to microcontrollers AND doing stuff with it. That's cool! I'm glad to see it.
@profoundlynerdy Forth is pretty awesome, and in fact it at one point occurred to me that one could build a BASIC-like OS with it, defining or redefining a word at a time rather than using line numbers like in BASIC, or blocks of source code like in old Forth systems. And it turns out someone did make such a thing: the Jupiter Ace.
But I think there are just a lot more people around familiar with line-numbered BASICs, and who know BASIC at all. And it's a bit easier for novices to learn than Forth, since it takes some doing to wrap one's brain around the stack.
Forth seems to live in this weird space with Lisp, where there are people who get it and absolutely love it (and plenty of people love both!), but most people will simply never touch either. Though honestly I have no idea how the numbers compare to something like BASIC. Is it really more accessible to someone with no exposure to any of the above, or is it just that there's still a large pool of people who grew up using microcomputers?