When I was 11 years old, I was about 2 years into my journey as a #Computer #Programmer, but had been limited to #QBasic, outside of the occasional dabbling with #Apple #Hypercard at school. I wanted to do more, but C was a bit too advanced for me. That christmas, my #dad surprised me with a boxed copy of Visual Basic 5.0 Enterprise edition. At the time, it was like $500. One of the greatest presents I have ever been given, I had no idea VB existed or that it was exactly what I wanted.

My 8 year old son has fallen in love with this old laptop that honestly isn’t useful for that much as the speed and wifi is so slow.

But he says he wants to learn how to code on it.

@codemonkeymike yes, I would recommend learning Racket. The Racket language is relatively lightweight compared to modern app development frameworks such as VSCode so runs nice and fast on older hardware, and it is designed specifically for teaching coding. There are some nice books aimed at kids for teaching Racket as well:

• https://www.realmofracket.com/

It is about as easy as learning BASIC was when I was a kid.

@codemonkeymike @rl_dane I have a copr repo for qb64! But I've also successfully ran actual #QBasic from a floppy drive in #Lutris, which I'm near certain uses DOSBox under the hood, but the important detail about that is that I didn't have to figure that out for myself.

@nixCraft when I was around 12 years and got my first own PC, a #8086 #Amstrad, my cousin wrote together with me this first little program, after I asked him: "Andreas... was ist eigentlich dieses #QBASIC?" ("Andreas... what is this 'QBASIC'?")

It really made an impression on me and I thank him from the bottom of my heart!

Fun fact: The song is coded in #QBasic and is much longer than in the clip!

https://github.com/vwbusguy/qbsh/blob/main/qbsh.bas#L129