The Heart Behind Liberty BASIC

 As the creator of Liberty BASIC, I want to share the story behind this programming language, a project born out of my passion for making programming accessible, fun, and wondrous for everyone.  My journey in the realm of coding began with the magical experience of BASIC, a language that opened the doors to the world of software creation for me. I want to bring that same sense of excitement and possibility to others through Liberty BASIC.

What makes this especially inspiring I think is that Liberty BASIC was originally meant to be a programming game, where the player programmed robots in BASIC.

Bringing Back the Magic of BASIC

When I realized that the BASIC I was writing for the robot game would become a real programming tool, I decided to go for it!  My idea for Liberty BASIC was to recapture the spirit of the early days of BASIC. BASIC was the gateway for many into programming. It was simple, inviting, and allowed immediate interaction and results. My vision was to reignite that spark of wonder, making programming as much fun as it was for me when I first started.

Simplicity and Approachability

At the heart of Liberty BASIC lies its simplicity and approachability. The language is designed to be easy to learn and use, especially for those who are new to programming. It’s like giving someone a set of simple, intuitive tools to start building their dream projects right away.

Fun and Immediate Results

One of the unique features of Liberty BASIC is how it makes programming fun. I believe in the power of seeing your work come to life quickly. Beginners should be able to write a few lines of code and immediately see a window pop up, a graphic drawn, or a simple game come to life. This immediate feedback is not just rewarding; it's crucial in maintaining enthusiasm and interest in learning.

Liberty BASIC vs. Other Languages

While other languages like Python and JavaScript are powerful and versatile, they can be daunting for beginners.  I've always tried very hard to balance simplicity with capability. 

My Vision and Journey

My personal journey with programming has always been about the joy of creating and of learning new ways to think. With Liberty BASIC, I wanted to offer a tool that makes programming feel like an adventure, not a chore. It's been heartwarming to see people of all ages take their first steps in programming with Liberty BASIC, discovering the same joy and wonder that I found years ago.

In essence, Liberty BASIC is more than just a programming language; it's a celebration of the simplicity, fun, and wonder that programming can bring. It's been a wonderful journey that I am eager to invite others to join.

Links

        Liberty BASIC website 

        Liberty BASIC community forum  

        Liberty BASIC video playlist  

Have The Courage to Declutter - Best Practices Series

The things in our homes each have their own purpose, and they have their proper place.  In the course of time there is the inevitable accumulation of things, and this can become clutter which is a problem.  This is a way to think about programming.  It is not a perfect metaphor of course but I think it is useful.

Clean Your Room and Take Out the Trash

Living is a messy affair.  We do all kinds of things in our rooms.  Things like eating, opening and reading mail, getting dressed and undressed, play video games, etc.  If we don't stop and put things away and throw out the trash our rooms will unlivable.  How can we apply this when programming? First all if you find that you are commenting out code (in some languages comments are called remarks) then after a while your code will become harder to read and maintain.  Similarly if you notice you never use some part of your code any more it might be a good idea to delete that code.

Be brave and delete the old code.  If you want to keep the code then save the file in a different name so that you won't lose that version of it.  If you are using some kind of source code control (also known as version control) then you will never lose old code.

Don't Be a Hoarder

Hoarders are afraid to get rid of things and they often have many of the same kinds of things until their house fills up with so much stuff that they can't find anything and there is no room to live in their house anymore.

How to implement this idea in programming?  Each idea should only be expressed in one place. Do you notice sometimes when you're writing code that you are doing the same thing again and again so that when you change something then it needs to be changed everywhere you have that similar code?  You need to create a subroutine or a function that does that one thing in only one place, and then call that routine from all those places where the code was duplicated.  This is a kind of code refactoring.

Live In a Tiny House

Imagine your program must fit in a constrained memory.  What is the purpose of this, you might ask?  Today we have what is essentially unlimited memory in our computers.  If you just sat down and wrote code every day for the rest of your life you would never be able to fill up all that memory.  You might not be able to resist the temptation to add every single feature that you can to your software.  People who live in a tiny house often ask themselves what are the essential things, and what can be disposed of?  The more features you have, the more code you have, and the more complicated it is, and this makes it harder to extend and maintain.

    -"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

I hope this article is helpful to you and will give you something to incorporate into your work.

Ajax and BASIC

Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) style techniques for building interactive web applications are the rage today. They are somewhat overhyped, but there is some value there.

Run BASIC already provides an exceptionally easy web programming system, but it does so with minimal special effects. There is a tiny bit of Javascript being used but almost everything is done with XHTML on the browser, and a very smart web application server.

In release v1.0 of Run BASIC the widgets (and indeed the page itself) are all objects. They are created by very simple statements. Any sort of Ajax inspired widgets for a future release of Run BASIC must not be any more complicated to use than the simple to use widgets that are already there.

Additionally, one of the most important aspects of Ajax is partial page reloading. This is important and we are eagerly planning to add this. What this will allow you the Run BASIC program to do is to reload a small part of your web app in the browser so that each user action does cause the whole page to be refreshed from the browser. This provides for smoother feeling user experience, and it also can improve performance.

So, Ajax must not complicate Run BASIC. Our design philosophy is to respect the simplicity of BASIC as much as possible. There are too many complicated programming systems out there, and the world doesn't need another one.

iPhone BASIC?

Now that we've released Run BASIC, we would like to collect some feedback about the idea of adding some capability for the iPhone (and other mobile phones). There is a Javascript library and some CSS called iUi http://code.google.com/p/iui/ which provides the metaphor and visual look for iPhone (and iPod Touch) apps. This would make for very easy iPhone development, and it could be a great marketing button for Run BASIC.

Apple plans to announce some sort of SDK next month if I'm not mistaken, but a lot of iPhone software development will definitely still be web apps.

We could:

• Work on this now
• Work on this later
• Encourage the RB community to integrate iUi by writing BASIC code

Perhaps the last option is the most sensible for now. Feedback is welcome.