Introduction

This is the official blog of quitebasic.com. Quite BASIC has already turned out to be an unlikely hit on the Internet and it is time to open up this channel.

It all started when I read an article by David Brin in Salon (Why Johnny can't code). The article is about how bright kids today don't learn to program the way kids used to. He points out that there are millions of students with textbooks containing BASIC code examples, but that the vast majority do not know how to try them.

I proceeded to write a DHTML environment for writing, testing, and running classic BASIC programs. It was key to make the site as accessible as possible. Consequently there is no sign-up or even download necessary. Just go to the site and start typing in the program. -- Simplicity is key.

Now it turns out that there is another crowd that enjoy the site even more. Yes, you guessed it: middle aged geeks like myself who like to remember the good old times. Incidentally, they are by now often parents so it works out really well.

I will use this blog to communicate updates to the service and general discussion.