Announcing a series of "Getting started" tutorials

[Sheepdog]

Early days... but I hope there's enough at ...

https://wywtk.com/prgm/bas/index-bas.htm

... to help a beginner make a few first steps.

Nothing like as polished as the official Tutorial, but pitched at a different level, and done with a different approach. Wrote my first program in 1968, taught computing from 1980, primary and secondary schools. Not my first series of guides for beginners!

I hope you will deem them worth Facebook "likes", etc. If no one visits these pages, it will be a message to me as to the point of doing more pages.

[Richard Russell]

I hope you will deem them worth Facebook "likes", etc. If no one visits these pages, it will be a message to me as to the point of doing more pages.

Support from all quarters is very much appreciated, because I am increasingly unable to provide it myself.

It's true that my major concern is not support for beginners, because I would say that is reasonably well served already, but support for 'advanced' uses of BBC BASIC. We've lost some of the 'experts' who were able to provide such support (Jon Ripley, Malcolm Marten, David Williams et.al.) and they've not been replaced by a new cohort unfortunately.

I would not like to see BBC BASIC being used only for 'simple' applications, especially as that would likely mean many of my language extensions, libraries, IDE utilities etc. not being used.

[Sheepdog]

I was delighted to find in the excellent documentation that this BASIC goes WAY beyond what the original BBC BASIC did. I love the high-res graphics. I love that it can read and write to data files, interact (I think!) across a serial interface. (I may well be hanging Arduinos off of the Windows PC on a serial i/f, and having them interact with BBC BASIC programs in the PC.)

My current pupil is 9 years old and has done no previous coding. We have a ways to go before we will be delving into the advanced features... but I eschewed all of the several "for beginners" environments because they would let him down if he turns out to be one of the kids who catch fire, and "are away".

Even if I one day move him to something like Lazarus... in BBC BASIC he's getting a good grounding in things done "the grown up" way.

(I love Appendix A in https://www.bbcbasic.net/bbcwin/tutorial/index.html, by the way! (^_^) (Line numbers, etc: "They are not considered polite conversation and ladies should be asked..." )

[Richard Russell]

I was delighted to find in the excellent documentation that this BASIC goes WAY beyond what the original BBC BASIC did.

My ambition has been to make BBC BASIC a 'usable' competitor to Python. Of course it will never match Python in many respects, but the majority of those are more 'cosmetic' than essential for programming, in my judgement.

And where Python does have functionality which BBC BASIC does not, it is often possible to achieve something similar by means of libraries. I even started to write a library to provide some of Python's list functionality, but I abandoned it largely because it lacked 'elegance'.

But with the introduction of array slicing in the latest release of BBC BASIC - which can directly be applied to lists - I may well revisit this library, since lists are considered by some to be an important data type.

And BBC BASIC does have some capabilities which Python does not! I would particularly point to the amazing cross-platform compatibility of BBCSDL, even to the extent of sound and music, 3D and shader graphics, anti-aliased graphics, 2D physics simulations etc.

Python does have libraries for these, but they are not available in such a platform-independent way as the BBC BASIC libraries are, and Python's support for running programs in a browser is still much poorer than BBC BASIC's.

Being able to run programs in a browser, to the extent that BBCSDL can, provides a 'universality' in terms of what platforms can be supported, and eliminates the need to download something which might be harmful. With the prevalence of scams and malware this is a big deal.